I
Could so have managed not to be flinging
down this challenge.
True way is homeless but the better gods
go with the house. Cogito a mere
threshold, as G. Marcel sharply declares,
of what’s valid.
Come round to the idea, even so
belated, and knock. Echo the answer
in spare strophes that yield almost nothing
to the knowledge
outside them raw with late wisdom.
Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps not Gide’s
doctrine of the moment which passes
as verity
in veritable suffusion. Grace
appears hardly spontaneous in that sense;
and in no sense whatever of the mere
veto or grab
of reality to our self-desires
as in a telling run of worldly luck
eminently worthy of these maimed lives.
I would forgo
this chant and others if I were not
more than a shade distressed. The sacrament
in its little hutch, the geyser’s patio
of scalded earth,
beauty and disfigurement, all interest
set on the bias, accrued poverty
breaking every bank. The light exhaled
by spirits of great
purity is also in the finest painters
transfigured common light, the crown
of their achievements. Divine Marcel
withholds this gift
from artists of the word no doubt exactly
according to his lights which are quite something.
Knowledge, self-mastery, the self-embedded body not ours
by deed of possession though suffering
possesses it and makes it ours in time.
I trust the arbiter-that’s difficult.
My marginal
ontological reader, let her recoup
a line or two delivered without pathos.
II
I cannot work much closer to the slub;
or perhaps it’s
diffused like rumor, meaning diffused power.
How awkward this must sound. I’m reading Cornford
from a split paperback almost my age.
John Cornford dead
in Spain at twenty-one. Ninety this year.
Plaudits for Lenin and for Bela Kun.
Time turns sincerity to false witness abetted by
our clear-headed stupidities; on occasion
a kind of brutishness conferred as love.
Heart of the heartless world he took from Marx
for a poem
part-way to timeless. Fine by either book.
The power-and-beauty mob has my bequest.
III
Not to skip detail, such as finches brisking
on stripped haw bush;
the watered gold that February drains
out of the overcast; nomadic aconites
that in their trek covenant beautifully
our sense of place,
the snowdrop fettled on its hinge, waxwings
becoming sportif in the grimy air.
IV
I accept, now, we make history; it’s not some abysmal power,
though making it kills us as we die to loss.
What lives is the arcane; by our decision
a lifetime’s misdirection and a trophy
of some renown
or else nothing; the menagerie
of tinnitus crowding a deaf man’s skull
has more to say. Woman’s if you so rule.
It’s gibberish
we bend to or are balked by on the spot,
treatise untreatised and the staring eyes.
The windflower has more stamina to fail,
the Lent lily,
the autumn crocus with its saffron fuse,
all that we fancy and make music of,
like Shakespeare’s metaphors for governance,
nature itself
brought in to conserve polity; hives of gold
proclaim a gift few of us can afford.
V
Say everything works well but that it works just like mischance.
Something of value is derived regardless
of our botched loves, uncalled-for, unconnived-at.
Civil power now smuggles more retractions
than hitherto;
public apology ad libs its charter,
well-misjudged villainy gets compensated.
I still can’t tell you what that power is.
The statute books
suffer us here and there to lift a voice,
judge calls prosecutor to brief account,
juries may be stubborn to work good like a brave child
standing its ground knowing it’s in the right.
Letters to the editor can show wisdom.
VI
Well, there’s a fortune in it if you sail
once round the world
faster than Jules Verne in his fantasy.
Fantasy makes a power of money too.
Money’s not civil power in itself;
more the enforcer.
Types of physical prowess are a gift,
also computer skills at a high pitch.
I lack the staying power of the grand minimalist:
gnarl and burr, whoops of recycled basso,
the off-key sweetness of a single bell,
the world-wide reputation, decent life.
Let’s all shore up
half-decent lives this Lent, happy and holy.
Two or three people I would call saints
without lust for sincerity which
Marcel describes,
an exaltation [in one’s] negative
powers. I aim to cite correctly
but admit license when the words won’t match
with my own brief
to set this tricky artifact on line
for the realm of primal justice and accord.
VII
Why Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps, this has nothing to do
surely with civil power? But it strikes chords
direct and angular: the terrible
unreadiness of France to hold her own:
nineteen forty
and what Marc Bloch entitled Strange Defeat;
prisoners, of whom Messiaen was one,
the unconventional quartet for which the Quatuor
was fashioned as a thing beyond the time,
beyond the sick decorum of betrayal,
Pétain, Laval, the shabby prim hotels, senility
fortified with spa waters. (When I said
grand minimalist I’d someone else in mind
just to avoid confusion on that score.)
Strike up, augment,
irregular beauties contra the New Order.
Make do with cogent if austere finale.
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