Levin, on his way to Kitty’s love,
Saw children walking in a row to school,
Bluish doves flying down from the eaves
And little floury loaves thrust out
By an unseen hand. “It all happened at once,”
Tolstoy says: a boy ran suddenly
Toward a dove and glanced back, smiling,
At Levin. The dove flew up, wheeling,
And the snowflakes glittered in the sun.
From the windows came a smell of fresh bread
And the loaves were put out. Remember?
So much grace Tolstoy grants without God.
“It all happened at once,” once at midnight
In that unseasonable fall of ours
It seemed to me the universe slowed down
And lingered in a climate of its choice
As if without the Law. I had a sense
Of something ceded, something given over
In that bad autumn, when day after day
The city warmed, its summer smells restored
To a tempting lie. All our sparrows stayed
While even migratory birds confined
Their circulation, did not go, but hung
Upon the hindered weather like a curse.
I reached our crooked corner where the night
Unwinds. Like Levin, I was on my way.
Slowly the citizens moved past, so many
Allegories of choice, most of them gay
As bright October’s wreck or brazenly
Concealing the winter to come. Over us loomed
The ladies’ prison where The Girls called down
Inaccurate obscenities to us
Or to each other, inside out. Above
Our “rescued” Ruskin courthouse roof
The tower held its numb Gothic dial
Gold as a medal against the dim sky.
There I stood among The Boys, marvelling
While they murmured by me like a stream
Beneath the shouting girls, shorn Rapunzels
In their castle keep, and stared above
At the clock, at the unfeeling sky
Above even that, wondering what wind
Could carry off our grief, could save us
Or by leaving soothe? Was liberty
To leave enough? It was enough to stay,
To inhabit earth, where we do not stay
But unlike God in heaven, come and go.
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