Meanwhile, two more poems and a sort of prose thing follow.
THE
BEADLE
The beadle is dancing
Graceful,
in his thick coat,
Every
step exact
As
if the Earth had pined
Waiting
for his heavy foot
To
fall just so.
The
cat, amazed,
Pretends
by the window
That
no mad beadle
Dances
with the wind.
But
she licks her paw
Distraitly.
Aghast,
the gods watch.
That
their beadle,
Born
for ills unnumbered,
Should
dance as if
The
business of his life
Was
to dance!
BEFORE THE WORLD WAS
Before the
world was, Wales was;
I have this from
Hunt who had seen
A Welsh
genealogy. Towards the middle
God creates the
Heavens and the Earth.
Not an
over-proud folk, the Welsh.
Perhaps they
welcomed the rest of the world
Suddenly
appearing, slamming into place
Around Wales, which had always been.
Or perhaps it
had happened by degrees
The rest of
creation coming into focus
And trying to
look as if it, too,
Had always been
there.
Some
Welsh farmer,
I expect, pulled
down the family Bible
(A huge thing,
with all the pages blank
Save for the one
in the middle labelled
Births and
Deaths”) and wrote
Up all night
with sick cow. About 10:30
Rest of world
appeared. About time, too!”
THOUGHTS
Or soon or
late I will forget how to remember, and thereafter the atoms which have kindly
consented all these years to be me will, realizing that I was not, after all, a
destination, but merely a stop upon the journey, recall other business they’ve
too long neglected. Bidding each other farewell, they will set off in all
directions, in search of new employment. Some will take a brief vacation
making, perhaps, a leisurely progress through the guts of a beggar. Others will
find that they’ve been transformed into light, hastening to wake some
long-buried seed. Still others will gravely dance on star winds between the
planets, or be the innocent victims of mad scientists who will shoot them at
each other at unimaginable speeds.
Yet, the
universe is more than infinite, and the time will surely come when all these
atoms return to one spot, and rejoin. Think of it as a reunion, generally
cheerful, but each atom noting to itself how extraordinarily the others have
aged, and how entropy has shredded their orbits and dulled the hum of their
electrons. Who but I can be guest of honor, conjured up from some obscure dream
wherein I’ve taken refuge, and called upon to speak?
“Friends”,
I may begin, “veterans all, what did we not do, what did we not accomplish in
our time together? Time itself cannot efface or change the minutes we conquered
and made our own. The instant we leapt in the air and hung there, defiant–
surely you recall? The laws of the universe were suspended, and whether they
would ever operate again was up to us, until we took pity on gravity and
consented to alight, and the world was as it was. A small hand; a glance, a
body curled on a bed; dust slowly whirling in a beam of light. A message sent
through a thousand years, reaching us near death, which we patched and healed
and sent on for another thousand or more? The promises kept, and the promises
broken, and birds singing for a traitor as though their hearts would break?
Voices, many voices. The feel of a round stone held in the hand.
“We chased
love and it chased us, and at moments time courteously stepped aside and
asserted no dominion over us. We did well and we did evil, and were done by as
we did.
“These, I
remind you all, were ours and are ours still. On a cold morning, over a sunlit
city street, the instant we considered whether ever we should be gravity’s
servants again continues.”
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