Coming from Delphi in the rain we met a country funeral.
At Delphi last night travelling the wastes of sky a bare
round moon went and the stream rushed in the absolute
pause of time, the cold furious sacred stream
away below; the big black mountain
mounted in blackness the milky air.
Oracle in no lair.
“A procession?” Our bus slows in the narrow road for the
crowd, rain-pricked,
jostling lightly. We look through open windows.
A brilliant morning told us another story:
the water, hill and air being bright: and the god’s slope
tumbled with honey-veined milky stone, grew flowers;
his columns stood on stone that allows
yellow blossoms to grow.
“A funeral?” “Yes!” A purple cloth. Then children—boys,
no girls; one holding a cupped flame on a pole, they go;
then the priest’s black billows; then on six shoulders the burden.
Fine as needles the rain began at eleven; in and out
of the holes in the Athenian Treasury the sparrows flew.
Was our magnet columns and blocks? Nonsense! We know,
all of us, what: Apollo.
She is not closed away. She is old. She is lying in cold spring
flowers
close to our astonished faces; see how we stare,
On her stonestill breast her rainy hands are crossed;
powerful nose, still lips, she is yellow like stone.
One thing brought us to Delphi, the scent of the god;
in the cypress thrust, in the rocks where
we climbed; in our care. In our care.
The feet go past to the earth. The vines like snakes
rear from the earth and the petals of almonds blow
and alight on the earth. We in our leather seats,
prim animals with the knowledge of death in our eyes,
exchange quick glances of complicity.
The rites, the gifts: it all meant Show
a sign. Speak now.
Beaded with rain in the dusk they are gone. The flame, the
tilted
cross, the homage of bearing, the honor of flow
ers, have turned an old woman toward spring, in the dust
of the olives, in the soil of the vines; the honor was for the
passage,
that part of the gesture—the columns broken, unbroken.
For the confrontation, of where, of how.
The stone said so.
The quick was the god’s gesture—unpredictable,
precious, final. That light on stone, horses that rear
to stone, stone eyes, stone wind, meant one point: the man,
the god, the question. In isolation, the earth’s shift,
the light darkening. Old woman yellow like stone, yours
is no delphic answer. Far and fair
on our dark, silent Athens is there.
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