ofblcckcats

[ofblcckcats]

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off the beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine, Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. II You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. III Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge by Hart Crane How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty— Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; —Till elevators drop us from our day ... I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene Never disclosed, but hastened to again, Foretold to other eyes on the same screen; And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced As though the sun took step of thee, yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,— Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan. Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene; All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn ... Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still. And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,— Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path—condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. Under thy shadow by the piers I waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear. The City's fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year ... O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God. Tom O' Bedlam's Song anonymous ballad, circa 1620 From the hag and hungry goblin That into rags would rend ye, The spirit that stands by the naked man In the Book of Moons, defend ye. That of your five sound senses You never be forsaken, Nor wander from your selves with Tom Abroad to beg your bacon,    While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,    Feeding, drink or clothing;    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,    Poor Tom will injure nothing. Of thirty bare years have I Twice twenty been enragèd, And of forty been three times fifteen In durance soundly cagèd. On the lordly lofts of Bedlam With stubble soft and dainty, Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips, ding-dong, With wholesome hunger plenty,    And now I sing, Any food, any feeding,    Feeding, drink or clothing;    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,    Poor Tom will injure nothing. With a thought I took for Maudlin, And a cruse of cockle pottage, With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all, I befell into this dotage. I slept not since the Conquest, Till then I never wakèd, Till the roguish boy of love where I lay Me found and stript me nakèd.    While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,    Feeding, drink or clothing;    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,    Poor Tom will injure nothing. When I short have shorn my sow's face And swigged my horny barrel, In an oaken inn, I pound my skin As a suit of gilt apparel; The moon's my constant mistress, And the lovely owl my marrow; The flaming drake and the night crow make Me music to my sorrow.    While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,    Feeding, drink or clothing;    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,    Poor Tom will injure nothing. The palsy plagues my pulses When I prig your pigs or pullen Your culvers take, or matchless make Your Chanticleer or Sullen. When I want provant, with Humphry I sup, and when benighted, I repose in Paul's with waking souls, Yet never am affrighted.    But I do sing, Any food, any feeding,    Feeding, drink or clothing;    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,    Poor Tom will injure nothing. I know more than Apollo, For oft when he lies sleeping I see the stars at mortal wars In the wounded welkin weeping. The moon embrace her shepherd, And the Queen of Love her warrior, While the first doth horn the star of morn, And the next the heavenly Farrier.    While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,    Feeding, drink or clothing;    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,    Poor Tom will injure nothing. The Gypsies, Snap and Pedro, Are none of Tom's comradoes, The punk I scorn, and the cutpurse sworn And the roaring boy's bravadoes. The meek, the white, the gentle, Me handle not nor spare not; But those that cross Tom Rynosseross Do what the panther dare not.    Although I sing, Any food, any feeding,    Feeding, drink or clothing;    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,    Poor Tom will injure nothing. With an host of furious fancies, Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear and a horse of air To the wilderness I wander. By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end: Methinks it is no journey.    Yet I will sing, Any food, any feeding,    Feeding, drink or clothing;    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,    Poor Tom will injure nothing. After the Persian by Louise Bogan I I do not wish to know The depths of your terrible jungle: From what nest your leopard leaps Or what sterile lianas are at once your serpents' disguise      and home. I am the dweller on the temperate threshold, The strip of corn and vine, Where all is translucence (the light!) Liquidity, and the sound of water. Here the days pass under shade And the nights have the waxing and the waning moon. Here the moths take flight at evening; Here at morning the dove whistles and the pigeons coo. Here, as night comes on, the fireflies wink and snap Close to the cool ground, Shining in a profusion Celestial or marine. Here it is never wholly dark but always wholly green, And the day stains with what seems to be more than the      sun What may be more than my flesh. II I have wept with the spring storm; Burned with the brutal summer. Now, hearing the wind and the twanging bow-strings, I know what winter brings. The hunt sweeps out upon the plain And the garden darkens. They will bring the trophies home To bleed and perish Beside the trellis and the lattices, Beside the fountain, still flinging diamond water, Beside the pool (Which is eight-sided, like my heart). III All has been translated into treasure: Weightless as amber, Translucent as the currant on the branch, Dark as the rose's thorn. Where is the shimmer of evil? This is the shell's iridescence And the wild bird's wing. IV Ignorant, I took up my burden in the wilderness. Wise with great wisdom, I shall lay it down upon flowers. V Goodbye, goodbye! There was so much to love, I could not love it all; I could not love it enough. Some things I overlooked, and some I could not find. Let the crystal clasp them When you drink your wine, in autumn. Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard by Thomas Gray The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds: Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep. The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share, Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

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