I
I came to this place one November day.
Mauve walls uprose then tranquilly, and still
Must rise to wind-burned eyes that way—
Old brickwork on a hill,
Surfaces of impunity beneath a gray
And listed sky. Yet I could read dismay
There rightward in a twisted beech
Whose nineteen leaves were glittering, each
A tear in a moveless eye, caught in the pale
Deep-pouring wind. Now walls
Are thin against this dense insistent gale,
False when the wind talks in our halls,
Useless at night when these crossed window bars
Catch every whisper of wind that comes and falls,
Speaking, across my compline with the stars.
II
Winds; words of the wind; rumor of great walls pierced
Like these, windward, but bomb-pierced. I know. Sun
Burnished the gape, spilled through, dispersed,
Quenched in the murk. Someone
Removed his helmet. Sorrow-stunned at first
Stood we, even we, dunced at such grave bomb-burst;
But then groped forward through the nave.
Wind in a ruined choir. None save
A pigeon to meet us, bird fabulously white
That rose as we came near,
Climbing and fluttering up the cascade of sunlight,
Quick wing clamor in cumbrous air,
And vanished, left us there in that wrecked church.
Silence then; only the old world’s wind to hear.
But we, with rifles poised, kept on our search.
III
Detrital memory sifts in a windy skull
Close to the wall: fireflies, warm winds, the South,
A lady walking proud and tall,
She taken, kissed at mouth,
Lissom for love and gravely beautiful.
Hast thou at last gone? Dear one, I recall
Nine cities, and your absolute art
Was love, the gift of the meaning part
Whereof our touch was history, the green earth
Made mythical; this endures
Bodiless in your skill. No storm or dearth
Can harm it. No mortalness incurs
Its frailty. Times late in madness keep this power
Thus sweet and classical, and it is yours.
Wrack of the wind, wide, wide, but here this flower.
IV
I hurt. Hungrier flowers seek my rank ground.
Indelible, one drifts on my Japan,
Rooted as if its stem were wound
Into the heart of a man.
A crumpling sky, a blurted dawn! The sound
Of history burst the years and history drowned.
We lived. The aftersilence fell.
We lived unworded, dumb in hell,
For which word mattered, pity or shame? The roots
Try my breast-cage. My bone
Gleams in the rot. I know you, sir! What bruits
This cry from many a dolmen stone?
Murther! I’m human. Come then, jacket me.
A flawed mind’s falling. But say, what page is blown
By the furrowing wind over a black, black sea?
V
But once winds lightened, fresh’ning fair from the West.
Hayscent, grandfather told me, filled the plain.
And came the Great Man, voice possessed,
Broad brow and flashing mane,
Chanting the silvered words of labor blest,
Deliverance come for God’s folk all oppressed.
And the city at the prairie’s edge
Rises to meet him. Poets pledge
His name to glory; sweet locust blooms in the park.
“Onward!” And great joy fills
Men’s eyes, and great hope lightens them. The dark
Is fading. See, the sunlight spills
Along the avenues. Onward! How slow
The years have been. Onward! For freedom wills
The day.—But all this happened long ago.
VI
It was our city too. Chrome and glass
Raised to the splintering sun, and a frowsty wind,
Shrewd in the avenue’s crevasse,
Whipping the trash. Rescind
A truth so visionless before we pass-
Something like that we pled, and spoke of class,
Betrayal, alienation. But…
Oh as the rooms that had been shut
Opened, and we could see within, and saw
Nothing, one by one,
And felt the scrabbling wind like a dead claw
And in our brains the shards of the sun,
We tried to hurry, breathless, stumbling, sick,
Tried to hurry, tried, but it was all done,
End and beginning, the saint and the heretic.
VII
Gnarled wind blurs the light; my hurt and another’s;
Yet his the more for that he knew twilight
At Hautefort, taught by the guild, the brothers,
En Arnaut for one, whose sight
Was music. And what has come of it? Wind smothers
And snuffs our looking. And he sought also the others
Deep in the tongues, makers who wrought
The clear eye-path newly. And what
Has come of it? And he gave us instruction, he that made
His canzos truly, he
That discovered again the shift and poise that weighed
In our speaking-heron-wing and the sea.
And what has come of it? And he of us all had risen
To history, taking wide compass, curiously,
And all now scattered, and he here in the wind’s prison.
VIII
I came to this place one November day.
The winter deepened; then at last came March,
Then May, and now another May,
Our outdoor season. A larch,
Of graceful habit, makes its green display,
And there seems very little left to say.
The soiled and motley pigeons pass
Like tick and tock upon the grass.
The nurse who supervises shuffleboard
Is continually amazed,
Being young and pretty. The male attendants hoard
Their tedium and yet are poised
For anything. Up where the slates are pearled
In sunlight an arrow turns forever, seized
In our four winds, pointing across the world.
IX
This land was once asylum when we came
Over the seas in bowsed and beetling ships
And found our plenty; but the home
We built here in our strips
Could not resist the wind of a trailing doom
That found us. Hence our home is a broken tomb.
Walls that no longer can protect
Against the old world’s ravening fact.
And in the same way was not all the earth
Asylum? Is mankind
In refuge? This is where we fled in birth,
But what we fled from we shall find.
It fills us now. And we shall search the air
And turn our eyes along the wind, as blind
Men do, and never find asylum here.
X
But rain’s in the wind, lost names bethou my heart.
Lady, I am lonely, tired, a puff of breath
Between stark bones of creature hurt,
Yet my particular death
Shames me: I sense me: the universal part,
Amor, fleshes in reason: and you assert
What all wounds know and I must follow
Now shyly. For sweetheart, fellow,
Through you to these, to everyone I think,
My hurt’s ruth flows. It fails
Their anguish, theirs fails mine, and we shall shrink,
Down, down, in our particular hells.
But even here tonight in the house of pain
Where the small wind spills among the broken walls
We lie each nailed and living, love’s pure gain.
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