The room a dying poet took at nightfall in a dead hotel had both directories — the Book of Heaven and the Book of Bell. It had a mirror and a chair, it had a window and a bed, its ribs let in the darkness where rain glistened and a shopsign bled. Not tears, not terror, but a blend of anonymity and doom, it seemed, that room, to condescend to imitate a normal room. Whenever some automobile subliminally slit the night, the walls and ceiling would reveal a wheeling skeleton of light. Soon afterwards the room was mine. A similar striped cageling, I groped for the lamp and found the line «Alone, unknown, unloved, I die» in pencil, just above the bed. It had a false quotation air. Was it a she, wild-eyed, well-read, or a fat man with thinning hair? I asked a gentle Negro maid, I asked a captain and his crew, I asked the night clerk. Undismayed, I asked a drunk. Nobody knew. Perhaps when he had found the switch he saw the picture on the wall and cursed the red eruption which tried to be maples in the fall? Artistically in the style of Mr. Churchill at his best, those maples marched in double file from Glen Lake to Restricted Rest. Perhaps my text is incomplete. A poet's death is, after all, a question of technique, a neat enjambment, a melodic fall. And here a life had come apart in darkness, and the room had grown a ghostly thorax, with a heart unknown, unloved — but not alone. <13 мая> 1950; Итака Some inevitable day On the editorial page Of your paper it will say, «Tactio has come of age». When you turn a knob, your set Will obligingly exhale Forms, invisible and yet Tangible — a world in Braille. Think of all the things that will Really be within your reach! Phantom bottle, dummy pill, Limpid limbs upon a beach. Grouped before a Magnotact, Clubs and families will clutch Everywhere the same compact Paradise (in terms of touch). Palpitating fingertips Will caress the flossy hair And investigate the lips Simulated in midair. See the schoolboy, like a blind Lover, frantically grope For the shape of love — and find Nothing but the shape of soap. <27 января> 1951 To think that any fool may tear by chance the web of when and where. O window in the dark! To think that every brain is on the brink of nameless bliss no brain can bear, unless there be no great surprise — as when you learn to levitate and, hardly trying, realize — alone, in a bright room — that weight is but your shadow, and you rise. My little daughter wakes in tears: She fancies that her bed is drawn into a dimness which appears to be the deep of all her fears but which, in point of fact, is dawn. I know a poet who can strip a William Tell or Golden Pip in one uninterrupted peel miraculously to reveal, revolving on his fingertip, a snowball. So I would unrobe, turn inside out, pry open, probe all matter, everything you see, the skyline and its saddest tree, the whole inexplicable globe, to find the true, the ardent core as doctors of old pictures do when, rubbing our a distant door or sooty curtain, they restore the jewel of a bluish view. 9 марта 1952 Before this house a poplar grows Well versed in dowsing, I suppose, But how it sighs! And every night A boy in black, a girl in white Beyond the brightness of my bed Appear, and not a word is said. On coated chair and coatless chair They sit, one here, the other there. I do not care to make a scene: I read a glossy magazine. He props upon his slender knee A dwarfed and potted poplar tree. And she — she seems to hold a dim Hand mirror with an ivory rim Framing a lawn, and her, and me Under the prototypic tree, Before a pillared porch, last seen In July, nineteen seventeen. This is the silver lining of Pathetic fallacies: the sough Of Populus that taps at last Not water but the author's past. And note: nothing is ever said. I read a magazine in bed Or the Home Book of Verse; and note: This is my shirt, that is my coat. But frailer seers I am told Get up to rearrange a fold. 1952 |
