PUNCTUALLY now, by all we learned at school,
I The stars fade down the angles of their rank.
First Venus, then Orion. Rule by rule
The book performs. Law, like a marble bank,
Locks to the gleaming tumblers, perfect doors,
The sweep of polished pillars and tile floors.
See, it is so: Astronomer, Man of Law,
Priest, Radio Announcer-all who Know
Have prophesied. And all forecasters saw
The omen that was neither rain nor snow
But a precise arrangement of the spheres
Hung in the sky to label all our years.
Now every night beneath this placid moon
I am assured the ordering of a fact:
The Western sky falls first and always soon
The East calls up in light for men to act,
And always between morning and the door
The Law is written on the barracks floor.
What was the omen that the wise men saw?
The dentist, doctor, and chiropodist,
The technical advisor, the man of straw
Who dressed in wax, a sideshow specialist,
And in the dim light of a traveling show
Passed for a medicine man by saying so?
Under the taut and tabulated stars
I stand in the barracks shadow like a pool,
Apprenticed to a sextant and the wars
Where even murder must be learned at school,
And sky, a shadow to be memorized,
Charts the shadow we had not surmised.
This is my night piece to the placid moon,
Memory, omens, and the Men of Law.
By clock and stars the ritual is soon:
The hour ends on the tiniest chime of awe
And time begins another number here
Punctual to the midnight of the year.
I hear the sound of sleepers in the dark
Their uniforms in order for the dawn
On shadowy chairs. Now let one sudden spark
Of daylight in, and see: before the man
Stirs back to flesh the clothes have leaped and gone
Row after row. Should I explore this omen?
There was a shining runner who approached
Rayed like a star and armored for delight.
He is not lying dead, his armor breached,
Nor racing on the wind as once he might.
He pauses at the lintel of no mood
Carved to a star’s computed altitude.
And all the rest is Law. Beneath what trees
The stars may drop him, or upon what cloud
He will return, there are no proofs but these:
Law will not walk the streets to cry aloud
Its future. Law may murder good.
Law is the last law to be understood.
Leave a Reply