style="font-size:15px;"> In the shadow of majesty, cannot but dumbly yearn
For its stronger oblivion.
Reject this archaic craving to be a herdsman
Of the immortals. Until they trample you down
Be still the herdsman’s boy among these giants
And the ridges of laurel.
AS THE GREAT HORSE ROTS ON THE HILL
As the great horse rots on the hill
till the stars wink through his ribs;
As the genera of horses become silent,
the thunder of the hooves receding in the silence;
As the tree shrivels in the wind of time,
as the wind Time dries the locust tree—
Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.
I have been in many towns and seen innumerable houses,
also rocks, trees, people, stars and insects.
Thieves, like ants, are making off with them,
taking them to your old ant-hill.
Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.
What spider made the machine of many threads?
The threads run
from time’s instants to all the atoms of the universe.
In each instant a wheel turns in your head, threads go taut,
and one of a quintillion atoms is transmuted.
Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.
I observe the ordained explosions on the paper as I write,
The pinpoints of flame in the wood on the table, and on the wall
(Like a battlefield at night, or a field where fireflies flicker).
My hand, too, scintillates like a strange fish;
Fires punctuate the faces on the road;
A pox, a fever, burns in the tissues of the hills.
Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.
As the great horse is transmuted on the hill
Till the stars wink through his skull;
As the stars become husk and radiance;
As the locust tree is changed by the wind Time;
As the wind Time too will lapse, will blow from another quarter—
Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.
IF CAUSALITY IS IMPOSSIBLE, GENESIS IS RECURRENT
The abrupt appearance of a yellow flower
Out of the perfect nothing, is miraculous.
The sum of Being, being discontinuous,
Must presuppose a God-out-of-the-box
Who makes a primal garden of each garden.
There is no change, but only re-creation
One step ahead. As in the cinema
Upon the screen, all motion is illusory.
So if your mind were keener and could clinch
More than its flitting beachhead in the Permanent,
You’d see a twinkling world flashing and dying
Projected out of a tireless, winking Eye
Opening and closing in immensity—
Creating, with Its look, beside all else
Always Adamic passion and innocence,
The bloodred apple or the yellow flower.
THE OLD WAR
No one cared for the iron sparrow
That fell from the sky that quiet day
With no bird’s voice, a mad beast’s bellow.
Sparrow, your wing was a broken scar
As you blundered into the mother-barley.
Sparrow, how many men did you bear?
“Ten good men, pilot and gunner—
Trapped in the whirlpool, held by no hands,
Twisting from truth with curse and prayer.
“Ten good men I bore in my belly—
Not as the mother-barley bears.
Ten good men I returned to her there.”
Thunder rolling over the barley!
Fire swarming high and higher!
Home again to the barley-mother—
Ten good sons, pilot and gunner,
Radioman and bombardier.
THE PREMONITION
Trying to imagine a poem of the future,
I saw a nameless jewel lying
Lurid on a table of black velvet.
Light winked there like eyes half-lidded,
Raying the dark with signals,
Lunar, mineral, maddening
As that white night-flower herself,
And with her delusive chastity.
Then one said: “I am the poet of the damned.
My eyes are seared with the darkness that you willed me.
This jewel is my heart, which I no longer need.”
JIM
