The Lion and the Rose Read online

Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

  There is no rice now and the world that sprang from it

  Like an azalea, brilliant from the swamps, has crumbled.

  A single century, it is embalmed as Egypt,

  A single century, and all that elegance was humbled—

  While we who fired that world and watched it burn

  Come every spring to whisper near the tomb,

  To stare, a little shaken, where the mosses mourn

  And the azaleas and magnolias have not ceased to bloom.

  Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

  WHERE THE PEACOCK CRIED

  Natchez, Mississippi

  The Cotton Kings

  Nothing could match the era’s dazzling façade,

  The white grace of the pillars in a gloom of trees;

  No sword has scarred, no vulgar hand has overlaid

  The pure triumphant form of this American Acropolis:

  Nothing could match the era’s marvelous shell.

  But push the heavy door and enter the dark chill

  Of empty halls. Listen while you are told,

  “The locks are solid silver, floors the old cypress still,

  Mantels Italian marble and twenty-carat gold

  Gilds the great mirrors”—that reflect the shabby places

  In the imported carpet and the tourists’ vacant faces.

  This was a beauty bought intact, mourning no dream,

  Paid for in cash, perhaps, but with no human breath.

  It is as brutal, savage as a peacock’s scream,

  Emblem of luxury and emptiness and death—

  Look for the heart within the house, the center of the cult,

  Look for the hearth, the household god, the mystery;

  You will not find it where all is perfect to a fault,

  Buried and cold under the weight of history,

  Gone with the swans that swam the artificial lakes.

  Did they with violent beating of white wings

  Vanish—for all wild beauty death forsakes—

  To leave the house to die among its things?

  Nothing could match the era’s dazzling façade,

  Nothing more lovely than the white Grecian portico,

  Where, if there was a dream, did the dream go?

  Where is the life lived here and what it made?

  That when you ask, the smug descendants say,

  “We lit a thousand candles here for Henry Clay.”

  The answer is not war that always has intensified

  A living dream.

  But here the peacock cried.

  IN TEXAS

  In Texas the lid blew off the sky a long time ago

  So there’s nothing to keep the wind from blowing

  And it blows all the time. Everywhere is far to go

  So there’s no hurry at all, and no reason for going.

  In Texas there’s so much space words have a way

  Of getting lost in the silence before they’re spoken

  So people hang on a long time to what they have to say;

  And when they say it the silence is not broken,

  But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them

  Over to miles of white-gold plains and grey-green hills,

  And they are part of that silence that outlives them.

  Nothing moves fast in Texas except the windmills

  And the hawk that rises up with a clatter of wings.

  (Nothing more startling here than sudden motion,

  Everything is so still.) But the earth slowly swings

  In time like a great swelling never-ending ocean,

  And the houses that ride the tawny waves get smaller

  As you get near them because you see them then

  Under the whole sky, and the whole sky is so much taller

  With the lid off than a million towers built by men.

  After awhile you can only see what’s at horizon’s edge,

  And you are stretched with looking so far instead of near,

  So you jump, you are startled by a blown piece of sedge;

  You feel wide-eyed and ruminative as a ponderous steer.

  In Texas you look at America with a patient eye.

  You want everything to be sure and slow and set in relation

  To immense skies and earth that never ends. You wonder why

  People must talk and strain so much about a nation

  That lives in spaces vaster than a man’s dream and can go

  Five hundred miles through wilderness, meeting only the hawk

  And the dead rabbit in the road. What happens must be slow,

  Must go deeper even than hand’s work or tongue’s talk,

  Must rise out of the flesh like sweat after a hard day,

  Must come slowly, in its own time, in its own way.

  BOULDER DAM

  Not in the cities, not among fabricated towers,

  Not on the super-highways has the land been matched.

  Beside the mountains, man’s invention cowers.

  And in a country various and wild and beautiful

  How cheap the new car and the lighted movie look.

  We have been hourly aware of a failure to live,

  Monotonous poverty of spirit and the lack of love.

  But here among hills bare and desert-red,

  A violent precipice, a dizzy white curve falls

  Hundreds of feet through rock to the deep canyon-bed;

  A beauty sheer and clean and without error,

  It stands with the created sapphire lake behind it,

  It stands, a work of man as noble as the hills,

  And it is faith as well as water that it spills.

  Not built on terror like the empty pyramid,

  Not built to conquer but to illuminate a world:

  It is the human answer to a human need,

  Power in absolute control, freed as a gift,

  A pure creative act, God when the world was born!

  It proves that we have built for life and built for love

  And when we all are dead, this dam will stand and give.

  COLORADO MOUNTAINS

  Plain grandeur escapes definition. You

  Cannot speak about the mountains well.

  About the clear plane, the sharp shadow

  You cannot tell.

  Mountains define you. You cannot define

  Them. And all your looking serves to set

  What you have learned of the stern line

  Against an absolute.

  The frail taut structure of a human face

  Beside the sheer cliff drawn, all that you loved,

  All that can stand in such a bare clear place

  Is to be proved.

  And love that is a landscape in the past

  Becomes, like mountains, changeless. It is there.

  It is standing against its own image at last

  In a high air.

  OF THE SEASONS

  Sangre de Cristo Mountains

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  You spoke of spring and summer

  As we drove through the pinyon-spotted,

  Through the leopard-land, the hammer

  Of sun on the bronze and the violet.

  You spoke of lilies brushing

  The horses’ necks in spring

  And dry creeks water-rushing,

  “In the spring,” you told me.

  I remember all that you said

  Of the sharp cleavage, the heat,

  The cold that makes the head

  Bum with an inner tension,

  Sound like a glass humming.

  Words break in crystal air

  And silence is always coming,

  “It is here,” you told me.

  And when you spoke of summer,

  I knew the heat is in waves

  And earth begins to shimmer

  With violent reds and umber.

 
On the naked rock you told

  How the fierce path of wind

  Burned the structure bright as gold,

  And rock fire-bare not barren,

  “In the summer,” you told me.

  We did not speak of winter

  For then we turned and saw

  The sun crash and then splinter

  On peaks till they were flooded

  With light that aches with rose,

  And all the mountains iced

  Are burned again—“and those,”

  You said, “are called The Blood of Christ.”

  INDIAN DANCES

  O have you heard it, far off, the deep drum

  Calling from the Plaza all feet to come,

  Calling from the Plaza the blood in the wrist

  To beat with the drum, the heart in the chest

  To beat with the drum, till the flesh is a fruit

  That swells with the drum, and from the bone’s root

  Aches with the drum, till all bodies are bound

  Fast to the drum and the drum to the ground,

  And the drum to the earth

  As the tree to the earth.

  O have you lived in the drum-beat, the deep beat

  As the old men move together, their eyelids shut fast,

  Move to answer the sound of the drum in their feet

  Till the song rises sweet in their old throats at last,

  And springs from their throats like a river in flood

  That comes from the mountains to answer the blood,

  Till the flesh is a fountain and all bodies rise

  Like rivers to song and the song goes to the skies,

  And the song to the sun

  As the tree to the sun.

  O have you seen them, the beautiful slow dancers

  Whose feet can implore the clouds for their answers,

  Whose feet can converse with the ghost of the buffalo,

  The light antlered deer, and remember the rainbow,

  Whose feet can command the young corn to grow strong,

  Whose feet spring as light from the source of the song

  As the song from the rivers held secret within

  And from drum bound to earth, the fruit of the skin,

  And the dance to the skies

  As the tree to the skies.

  O have you heard the drum-beat and the river of song?

  O have you come from far to see the grave dances?

  And not known that you came to be freed by the song?

  And not known that you came to be healed by the dances,

  And not known that you came to witness your birth,

  That you came to give back your flesh to the earth,

  That you came to give back the deep rivers that rise

  In the heart till it floods and pours from your eyes,

  To give back the song to the clouds and the great rain,

  Until you, imprisoned, are freed of your mortal pain,

  As the dead are alone and free,

  As the living when born again,

  As the tree to the earth.

  SANTOS: NEW MEXICO

  Return to the most human, nothing less

  Will nourish the torn spirit, the bewildered heart,

  The angry mind: and from the ultimate duress,

  Pierced with the breath of anguish, speak for love.

  Return, return to the deep sources, nothing less

  Will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,

  To carve into our lives the forms of tenderness

  And still that ancient necessary pain preserve.

  O we have moved too far from these, all we who look

  Upon the wooden painted figure, stiff and quaint,

  Reading it curiously like a legend in a book—

  But it is Man upon the cross. It is the living saint.

  To those who breathed their faith into the wood

  It was no image, but the very living source,

  The saviour of their own humanity by blood

  That flows terribly like a river in its course.

  They did not fear the strangeness, nor while gazing

  Keep from this death their very precious life.

  They looked until their hands and hearts were blazing

  And the reality of pain pierced like a knife.

  We must go down into the dungeons of the heart,

  To the dark places where modern mind imprisons

  All that is not defined and thought apart.

  We must let out the terrible creative visions.

  Return to the most human, nothing less

  Will teach the angry spirit, the bewildered heart,

  The torn mind, to accept the whole of its duress,

  And pierced with anguish, at last act for love.

  POET IN RESIDENCE

  Carbondale, Illinois

  THE STUDENTS

  I looked behind you for the towers of music,

  And for the remembered words, blue hills of childhood;

  What human mind had touched yours to the quick?

  What passions, hungers streamed through your blood?

  Had you been Marie Curie or Keats or some sad queen

  Dying in great pomp and pride alone?

  Your grandfathers were huge with dreams,

  Crossed an ocean and half a continent, breathing hope;

  When corn failed further North after a drought,

  Migrated down to this hot and fertile land

  And named it Little Egypt, Bible in hand;

  Brought with them a tradition of fierce work,

  Saw cities rise in the wilderness, Thebes and Cairo,

  Governed themselves, invented States and rules,

  Imagined the marvelous rich life sure to grow

  When the ground was cleared, the hard work done,

  And on summer evenings, sitting Bible in hand,

  Dreamed of a great teacher or poet grandson.

  I looked behind you for the towers of music

  And found only the broken jazz record

  And last week’s magazine gone stale,

  An old moan and a blurred word,

  A flat face with no deepening scene behind it:

  You remember the portraits of the Renaissance,

  The face and then behind it the mysterious scene—

  The secret river, the soft green unemphatic hill

  Where everyone has been and no one has been.

  Literature is like this, you know, philosophy

  And music have this effect on the personality,

  Set behind it a magical, a marvelous world,

  Open it up, enlarge it, fill it with wild excitement—

  But ignorant of man’s long ecstasy and pain,

  You come to books as to a strange dull town

  Where you know no one by name and do not care,

  And never recognize the Waste Land as your own.

  I looked behind you and saw nothing, nothing at all,

  But a flat empty wall,

  I saw you lonely and bored walking in a dull town;

  I saw you letting the books fall.

  And then because there was nothing else to do,

  I saw you turning on the radio.

  CAMPUS

  Yes, I have been lonely, angry here,

  Lonely on the suffocating walks under the trees

  Where faces cross and re-cross bright with sweat,

  And damp hands clutch the books unmarked by love.

  Intricate and empty this criss-cross movement

  Through the green, through the bird song

  As if it were a dance but with no meaning,

  And I, the stranger, often lit up by anger,

  Waiting for someone to ask the simple question,

  “Why have you come and who are you, stranger?”

  And to say gladly, “Nothing but a voice,

  Nothing but an angry joy, a protestation,

  Nothing, a gift of nothing on the desolate a
ir—”

  Here in the center of America

  Steeped deep in the tiger-lily June

  Where the iced blue hydrangea

  Cuts the air like a tune,

  Here where the parched bird is still at noon,

  Here in the center of America where it is always noon,

  On the secure sidewalks of the typical town,

  I go alone and a stranger, a haunted walker,

  Full of self-questioning and wonder,

  Waiting for the speech, for the word

  To break the tension like a clap of thunder,

  “How can the books be broken to yield the dynamic answer,

  And we embody thought in living as does the dance, the dancer?”

  BEFORE TEACHING

  These nights when the frog grates shrilly by the pond

  And fireflies’ points of flame flicker the gloom,

  Where birds are stilled in the dense thicket-heat,

  And I have seen through haze a bloody moon

  Rise through the trees to make the sober town

  A legendary place, a place of fearful glory,

  These nights when, knowing I shall have to teach

  When morning comes again, are full of fear,

  I ask myself, fumbling and full of doubt, angry with time,

  How stamp for you as if a gold coin in relief

  The single signature of passion and belief?

  What through the years endures, the only joy,

  The one delight age does increase, the discipline

  That fosters growth within it and is ever fertile,

  And the great freedom too that comes with this—

  And if I cannot do it, why be a poet then,

  Or talk of art, or weep for its defeat?

  These nights the frog grates and the firefly

  Pricks the dense thickets of the gloomy heat

  Have known the heart’s will and its savage cry,

  And too the delicate cool wind, the blessing on the air.

  AFTER TEACHING

  I am only beginning to know what I was taught