heaven’s could-be hell.
Beware the temblors and the flood
That time hides fast in tourist’s blood
And shambles forth from hidden home
At sight of lost-in-ruins Rome.
Think on your joyless blood, take care,
Rome’s scattered bricks and bones lie there
In every chromosome and gene
Lie all that was, or might have been.
All architectural tombs and thrones
Are tossed to ruin in your bones.
Time earthquakes there all life that grows
And all your future darkness knows,
Take not these inner ruins to Rome,
A sad man wisely stays at home;
For if your melancholy goes
Where all is lost, then your loss grows
And all the dark that self employs
Will teem—so travel then with joys.
Or else in ruins consummate
A death that waited long and late,
And all the burning towns of blood
Will shake and fall from sane and good,
And you with ruined sight will see
A lost and ruined Rome. And thee?
Cracked statue mended by noon’s light
Yet innerscaped with soul’s midnight.
So go not traveling with mood
Or lack of sunlight in your blood,
Such traveling has double cost,
When you and empire both are lost.
When your mind storm-drains catacomb,
And all seems graveyard rock in Rome—
Tourist, go not.
Stay home.
Stay home!
I’ve seen a thousand homes go down the tracks
Away, away …
Late night or early morn,
There goes the house, all white, where I was born.
My traveling train
Gives back to me by moon or noontime’s rain
The house, the house, the house
Where I’m reborn again.
As common as sparrows in flight,
There flies by my front porch and me,
Out of sight, out of sight.
We are common together: common house, common weather,
Common boy on a bike on a cool dark night lawn,
Sinking in clover,
Or boy on brick street at dawn, roofing a ball:
Annie over! Annie over!
Where I’ll pop up next, Peoria or Paducah, I don’t know;
All I can say is:
Here I come, here I come,
There I go, there I go!
Always the same boy, bright-eyed as a mouse,
Always the same folks on the porch of that house,
Swinging by in the light,
Drowning deep in the night,
There they drift, there they fly
At the train whistle’s cry:
O good-bye, O good-bye.
Lawn and porch on the run; boy’s face like the sun
Looking up through the rain
As again and again, the boy who was me
Climbs a branch, drops from tree,
But arrives to depart
While his shout cracks my heart.
Lord, does anyone see
All those boys who are me,
And does anyone know all those homes white as snow
That like riverboats glide
In the tide of the train as it takes me away?
Who can say, who can say?
Just my time machine moves
Through the land of my loves,
And more houses and boys and more trees and more lawns
Wait there just ahead in the circling dawns.
A procession of dreams!
O, isn’t God clever?
He’s cloned me in teams.
So? I’ll live here forever!
Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone
They say that we must falter, fail, and fall away
To all that’s lost;
I say the cost is overmuch
I’d spend us better with our will.
The mills of our machine-made gods grind swift not slow,
I with their lightning-arcs and wild illuminations go
To light a path
Not
