Recovery Room, Georgia Baptist Hospital, 1958
If he should lift his hand
I knew my one son lived beyond recall,
Back-to-back with his stretched-out shadow
No longer, like Janus into sunlight and moonlight
Singing. I knew the listening dead
Raised up, in their assembled arms,
Farewell, farewell, as he.
If he should turn his head
Around, in its blasted hair,
I knew he was alive, but bore the deadly king
Upon his back: a shadow black and deep
As space, in a helmet glowing with spines:
That, prone in the body of the athlete,
Achilles had escaped from the dead.
If he should raise his lids
I knew that love was halfway in his brain,
Looking like water: that the world of death is full
Of springs and streams, and lakes,
Each stiller than the last, where warriors wander,
Their breast-plates beating frankly
With their hearts.
Those waters see no more
Than air, than sun, than stone,
And stare it blind with life. I held his hand.
A window like the sun went round
The room. Ether dissolved in a sweat.
A wandering smile broke out
Beneath his face.
As though for a brother,
He smiled: for a being who lives forever,
In the dead as well as the quick, in a fever of waiting.
He smiled as a cunning creature
Abandoned to time, and a hero
Who cannot die, where he looks
Like a pond on the sun,
Where he lies in an animal
Music. If he should tell me how
He saw his unborn brother’s face
Shudder in light, I should believe him,
For I know, more than he, those lakes.
Before he came to life
I was father to all the dead.
I know those clip-wing’d corselets,
The helmets brittle as paper, shining like flame
And like sun, and the helpless heroes cut
From the spiritless air of hell,
And wild for the usage of flesh,
As they watch the sick athlete come
Awaver on fumes of gas,
To sit in their frenzied council,
To dance with a bee-singing sword
Among the yews and the ilex, till the golden warrior
creep
On hands and knees to leap upon his back
To save his soul. My brain has glowed,
Before my son showed form,
To pick a son from the dead,
Alive with Apollo’s shape.
That hope shed a man of light.
I could feel how a woman’s womb
Would flash like a brain, with his image. Awaiting now
Another child, I sit with my mending son
In Spring, and watch for the dead to say
Good-bye to another of mine,
As the trees free-fall
Into their green, and the brass-bound creek
Hurls its bed down onward through the hills.
It is true the dead and I
Are powerfully bewildered this season
By signs of life in the loins
And those in the spirit’s
Poor timeless flesh.
I shall ask of them what they can give me:
What contract the drunken athlete,
Wounded, sick and sleeping on his
bed, Has made with them, for a brother,
Below the surface of thought,
Below the ground.
Like the dead about to be
Born, I watch for signs: by kings
Escaping, by shadows, by the gods of the body
Made, when wounded skillfully,
And out of their minds, descending
To the dead. These I shall see, and shall answer
Too late, for they have chosen.
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