for the First Time
Their Names in Dust, Their Dates in Grass
Long Thoughts on Best-Sellers by Worst People
They asked me where I’d choose to run, which favored? Ups? or Downs?
Where robot mice and men, I said, run round in robot towns.
But is that wise? for tin’s a fool and iron has no thought!
Computer mice can find me facts and teach me what I’m not.
But robot all inhuman is, all’s sin with cog and mesh.
Not if we teach the good stuff in, so it can teach our flesh.
There’s nothing wrong with metal-men that better dreams can’t chalk.
I’d find me robot-Plato’s cave if he lived on my block;
And though his eyes electric were, computerized his tongue,
Is that more wrong than Berlioz on LPs harped and sung?
So much electric fills our lives, some bad, some good, some ill.
But look! there Shaw and Shakespeare dance on Channel 7’s sill:
A gift of hearts and minds and eyes to see our dark/light face,
To weigh and balance halos/blights that half-destroy our race;
To midget make our rocket-ships, and squeeze grand Kong down small
Then Giants grow from Shavian seed to taunt, provoke us all.
As man himself a mixture is, rambunctious paradox,
So we must teach our mad machines: stand tall, pull up your socks!
Come run with me, wild children/men, half dires and dooms, half clowns.
Pace robot mice, race robot men, win-lose in robot towns.
Byzantium
I come not from
But from another time and place
Whose race is simple, tried and true;
As boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois,
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan. There I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
As any Yeats found to be true.
The house I lived in, hewn of gold
And on the highest market sold
Was dandelion-minted, made
By spendthrift bees in bee-loud glade.
And then of course our finest wine
Came forth from that same dandelion,
While dandelion was my hair
As bright as all the summer air;
I dipped in rainbarrels for my eyes
And cherries stained my lips, my cries,
My shouts of purest exaltation:
Byzantium? No. That Indian nation
Which made of Indian girls and boys
Spelled forth itself as Illinois.
Yet all the Indian bees did hum:
Byzantium.
Byzantium.
So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods’ bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade.
Pretending there beneath our sky
That it was Aphrodite’s thigh;
Pretending, too, that Zeus was ours
And Thor fell down in thundershowers.
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather a myth indeed
Did all of Plato supersede;
While Grandmama in rocking-chair
Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care,
Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright
To winter us on summer night.
And uncles gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
On Grecian porch on summer nights.
Then went to bed there to repent
The evils of the innocent
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, through the nights and through the years
