An Epilogue to “The Lost World”
in the last issue of this magazine
This spoonful of chocolate tapioca
Tastes like-like peanut butter, like the vanilla
Extract Mama told me not to drink.
Swallowing the spoonful, I have already travelled
Through time to my childhood. It puzzles me
That age is like it.
Come back to that calm country
Through which the stream of my life first meandered,
My wife, our cat, and I sit here and see
Squirrels quarreling in the feeder, a mockingbird
Copying our chipmunk, as our end copies
Its beginning.
Back in Los Angeles, we missed
Los Angeles. The sunshine of the Land
Of Sunshine is a gray mist now, the atmosphere
Of some factory planet: when you stand and look
You see a block or two, and your eyes water.
The orange groves are all cut down. … My bow
Is lost, all my arrows are lost or broken,
My knife is sunk in the eucalyptus tree
Too far for even Pop to get it out,
And the tree’s sawed down. It and the stair-sticks
And the planks of the tree house are all firewood
Burned long ago; its gray smoke smells of Vicks.
Twenty Years After, thirty-five years after,
Is as good as ever-better than ever,
Now that D’Artagnan is no longer old
Except that it is unbelievable.
I say to my old self: “I believe. Help thou
Mine unbelief.”
I believe the dinosaur
Or pterodactyl’s married the pink sphinx
And lives with those Indians in the undiscovered
Country between California and Arizona
That the mad girl told me she was princess of,
Looking at me with the eyes of a lion,
Big, golden, without human understanding,
As she threw paper-wads from the back seat
Of the car in which I drove her with her mother
From the jail in Waycross to the hospital
In Daytona. If I took my eyes from the road
And looked back into her eyes, the car would—I’d be
Or if only I could find a crystal set
Sometimes, surely, I could still hear their chief
Reading to them from Dumas or Amazing Stories,
If I could find in some Museum of Cars
Mama’s dark blue Buick, Lucky’s electric,
Couldn’t I be driven there? Hold out to them,
The paraffin half picked out, Tawny’s dewclaw
And have walk to me from among their wigwams
My tall brown aunt, to whisper to me: “Dead?
They told you I was dead?”.
As if you could die!
If I never saw you, never again
Wrote to you, even, after a few years,
How often you’ve visited me, having put on,
As a mermaid puts on her sealskin, another face
And voice, that don’t fool me for a minute
That are yours for good. … All of them are gone
Except for me; and for me nothing is gone
The chicken’s body is still going round
And round in widening circles, a satellite
From which, as the sun sets, the scientist bends
A look of evil on the unsuspecting earth.
Mama and Pop and Dandeen are still there
In the Gay Twenties.
The Gay Twenties! You say
The Gay Nineties…. But it’s all right: they were gay,
O so gay! A certain number of years after,
Any time is Gay, to the new ones who ask:
“Was that the first World War or the second?”
Moving between the first world and the second,
I hear a boy call, now that my beard’s gray:
“Santa Claus! Hi, Santa Claus!” It is miraculous
To have the children call you Santa Claus.
I wave back. When my hand drops to the wheel,
It is brown and spotted, and its nails are ridged
Like Mama’s. Where’s my own hand? My smooth
White bitten-fingernailed one? I seem to see
A shape in tennis shoes and khaki riding-pants
Standing there empty-handed; I reach out to it
Empty-handed, my hand comes back empty,
And yet my emptiness is traded for its emptiness,
I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found
Columns whose gray illegible advertisements
My soul has memorized world after world:
LOST—NOTHING. STRAYED FROM NOWHERE. NO REWARD.
I hold in my own hands, in happiness,
Nothing: the nothing for which there’s no reward.
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