Counselors

Whom should I consult? Philosophers

Are happy in their homes and seminars.

See this one with the mischievous bright childlike

Gaze going out through walls and air,

A tangent to the bent rays of the star.

Hear the chalk splutter, hear the groping voice:

Conceive the demiurge in his perpetual

Strife with the chaos of the universe,

That humming equilibrium of creation

Pure and enormous, crossed by the constant

Light of unimaginable combustion:

Teems, how it teems. An elm tree sighs

Beyond the dusty windowledge of June.

As in the mind the notes of a melody

Vibrate when vibration’s gone, a series

Generated by a decimal has no end;

Observe it closely, though; it stops when it stops.

The frail spectacles are bedimmed with spring.

But whom should I consult? Well-seasoned men,

Ruddy with business or the salty summer,

Autumnal in their woolens, gaze

Toward the quick plumes above the city.

A frosty morning sun reddens the river.

This one is meditative and well-qualified:

Decently shined, one heavy saddle-dark

Perforated brogan swings from the swivel

Chair arm; leaning back, the head

Well-cropped and grey, the experienced

Eyes quiet, with one highlighted pupil.

A reader of Herodotus in the evening.

The road was in receivership, the mills

Were in receivership, the bondholders

Suitably informed would not dissent

From an able plan of reorganization.

Easy did it.

And his beautiful daughters

Sink in a circle of white skirts like daisies,

Laughing for the brash photographer.

Years ago they sailed to the North Cape,

Made out that flecked mass in the East

With Mother and the broad-shouldered boy from Cook’s

On deck in the dim summer on the grey

Sea. Often they saw the fishermen

Off Cherbourg in the awe of morning hitting

The outside spanking seas: red sails in sea-light.

Far away in the nursery a music box

Plucks its icy Bavarian tune for them.

Then whom? A thousand flashes from Long Island

Enter the high room in the office building,

A heliograph of cars turning toward sunset.

Will he decipher them? The journalist

Sweats in his shirtsleeves, mutilates

Cigarettes in a smouldering tray, surveys

Me and the world in a racket of teletypes,

Sick of it and excited, needing a drink.

Positive copy sprouts from the typewriter,

Each paragraph a piston stroke. The sun

Glitters on Hackensack, sorrows on the land,

Goes out like a pliant egg sucked down a bottle.

Under the shadowing azure a violet

Dusk consumes the sharp walls of the world.

The melancholy distributor of wit

Snatches at straws amid the alien darkness,

A whirl of dusty danger.

For his retreat

The priest lifts up the monstrance, muttering

Abstracted Latin to the tinkle behind him.

Presently they will bawl the Stabat Mater.

And all those years at seminary, reading

St. Basil and Jerome, girding his cassock

For handball in the gritty cement courtyard

Under the swooping smoke of the powerhouse;

And ordination when the folks from Chicago

Wept before the bishop. Mortify

The flesh. Think on thy last end. Pray

The Holy Mother of God in her infinite mercy,

And Him who rests in the dark chapel always,

Where the wick burns in wax, a cuddling flame:

Deduced by Thomas from the tip of heaven.

Or should I tumble to the recumbent

Confessional, and the scientist of distress?

For any child the terror in the night,

The hating eyes by day may be

Death’s cunning orchestration: they prepare

The servant’s cry at last, absolute and lonely.

See this easy gentleman in tweeds,

Deepchested, a swimmer to the farthest light,

Diagnostician of the subaqueous

Faces of dreams: with patience like a lover

He must all day sustain his authority,

Must not be bored, merciful or amused.

Or the anatomist and healer of bones?

Trepanner, skilled in suturing, the masked

And sterile hero in the cone of light;

There the sweet ether cone must be inhaled

With one, two pulses of the fiery spiral

Singing into timeless speed or quiet:

A mound under a sheet, a square of pale

Mortal flesh incised in a seeping line,

Spreading its lips for pretty butchery.

Blankets, hypodermics and high fever,

Racing delirium in the ward; the tall screen

Efficiently deployed at the bedside;

Intravenous ministrations: charts: starch:

And how is he today. Pretty good, doc.

Or else the fly sits down on the dead face

In the dead sunny room.

Shall I have speech

With those undone by the world’s great memory?

Men translated by music, treasurers

Of the French phrase, the childhood images,

Unregarded announcers of prophecy;

Staring blind at the stained wall paper

In their nightly rooms; their dreadful hearts

Beating the beds where other hearts have slept

Like birds under the night wind of time.

See this one whom the currents under earth

Intoxicate, and the flosses of the sky:

Weeping, weeping in vanity and grief

He walks toward remote dawn in the empty city,

Facing the cold draft, fish-smell from the river,

Necessitous of love. Masters of intricate

Fancy, libertines of intelligence,

I. Until Jove let it be, no colonist

Mastered the wild earth; no land was marked,

None parceled out or shared; but everyone

Looked for his living in the common wold.

And Jove gave poison to the blacksnakes, and

Made the wolves ravage, made the ocean roll,

Knocked honey from the leaves, took fire away—

So man might beat out various inventions

By reasoning and art.

First he chipped fire

Out of the veins of flint where it was hidden;

Then rivers felt his skiffs of the light alder;

Then sailors counted up the stars and named them:

Pleiades, Hyades, and the Pole Star;

Then were discovered ways to take wild things.

In snares, or hunt them with the circling pack;

And how to whip a stream with casting nets,

Or draw the deep-sea fisherman’s cordage up;

And then the use of steel and the shrieking saw;

Then various crafts. All things were overcome

By labor and by force of bitter need.

II. Even when your threshing floor is leveled

By the big roller, smoothed and packed by hand

With potter’s clay, so that it will not crack,

There are still nuisances. The tiny mouse

Locates his house and granary underground,

Or the blind mole tunnels his dark chamber;

The toad, too, and all monsters of the earth,

Besides those plunderers of the grain, the weevil

And frantic ant, scared of a poor old age.

Let me speak then, too, of the farmer’s weapons:

The heavy oaken plow and the plowshare,

The slowly rolling carts of Demeter,

The threshing machine, the sledge, the weighted mattock,

The withe baskets, the cheap furniture,

The harrow and the magic winnowing fan—

All that your foresight makes provision of,

If you still favor the divine countryside.

III. Moreover, like men tempted by the straits

In ships borne homeward through the blowing sea,

We too must reckon on Arcturus star,

The days of luminous Draco and the Kids.

When Libra makes the hours of sleep and daylight

Equal, dividing the world, half light, half dark,

Then drive the team, and sow the field with barley,

Even under intractable winter’s rain.

But Spring is the time to sow your beans and clover,

When shining Taurus opens the year with his golden

Horns, and the Dog’s averted star declines;

For greater harvests of your wheat and spelt,

Let first the Pleiades and Hyades be hid

And Ariadne’s diadem go down.

The golden sun rules the great firmament

Through the twelve constellations, and the world

Is measured out in certain parts, and heaven

By five great zones is taken up entire:

One glowing with sundazzle and fierce heat;

And far away on either side the arctics,

Frozen with ice and rain, cerulean;

And, in between, two zones for sick mankind:

Through each of these a slanting path is cut

Where pass in line the zodiacal stars.

Northward the steep world rises to Scythia

And south of Libya descends, where black

Styx and the lowest of the dead look on.

In the north sky the Snake glides like a river

Winding about the Great and Little Bear—

Those stars that fear forever the touch of ocean;

Southward they say profound Night, mother of Furies,

Sits tight-lipped among the crowding shades,

Or thence Aurora draws the daylight back;

And where the East exhales the yellow morning,

Reddening evening lights her stars at last.

IV. As for the winter, when the freezing rains

Confine the farmer, he may employ himself

In preparations for serener seasons.

The plowman beats the plowshare on the forge,

Or makes his vats of tree-trunks hollowed out,

Brands his cattle, numbers his piles of grain,

Sharpens fence posts or pitchforks, prepares

Umbrian trellises for the slow vine.

Then you may weave the baskets of bramble twigs

Or dip your bleating flock in the clean stream.

Often the farmer loads his little mule

With olive oil or apples, and brings home

A grindstone or a block of pitch from market.

And some will stay up late beside the fire

On winter nights, whittling torches, while

The housewife runs the shuttle through the loom

And comforts the long labor with her singing;

Or at the stove she simmers the new wine,

Skimming the froth with leaves. Oh idle time!

In that hale season, all their worries past,

Farmers arrange convivialities—

As after laden ships have reached home port,

The happy sailors load the prow with garlands.

Then is the time to gather acorns and

Laurel berries and the bloodred myrtle,

To lay your traps for cranes and snares for buck,

To hit the fallow deer with twisted slingshots,

And track the long-eared hare—

When snow is deep, and ice is on the rivers.

V. What of the humors and the ways of Autumn?

Just when the farmer wished to reap his yellow

Fields, and thresh his grain,

I have often seen all the winds make war,

Flattening the stout crops from the very roots;

And in the black whirlwind

Carrying off the ears and the light straw.

And often mighty phalanxes of rain

Marched out of heaven, as the clouds

Rolled up from the sea the detestable tempest;

Then the steep aether thundered, and the deluge

Soaked the crops, filled ditches, made the rivers

Rise and roar and seethe in their spuming beds.

The Father himself in the mid stormy night

Lets the lightning go, at whose downstroke

Enormous earth quivers, wild things flee,

And fear abases the prone hearts of men—

As Jove splits Athos with his firebolt

Or Rhodope or the Ceraunian ridge.

The southwind wails in sheets of rain,

And under that great wind the groves

Lament, and the long breast of the shore is shaken.

If you dislike to be so caught, mark well

The moon’s phases and the weather signs;

Notice where Saturn’s frigid star retires,

Mercury’s wanderings over heaven; and revere

Especially, the gods. Offer to Ceres

Annual sacrifice and annual worship

In the first fair weather of the spring,

So may your sheep grow fat and your vines fruitful,

Your sleep sweet and your mountains full of shade.

Let all the country folk come to adore her,

And offer her libations of milk and wine;

Conduct the sacrificial lamb three times

Around the ripe field, in processional,

With all your chorus singing out to Ceres;

And let no man lay scythe against his grain

Unless he first bind oakleaves on his head

And make his little dance, and sing to her.

VI. When shall we herd the cattle to the stables?

The wind, say, rises without intermission;

The sea gets choppy and the swell increases;

The dry crash of boughs is heard on hills;

The long sound of the surf becomes a tumult;

The gusts become more frequent in the grove;

The waves begin to fight against the keels;

From far at sea the gulls fly shoreward crying;

The heron leaves his favorite marsh and soars

Over the high cloud. Then you will see

Beyond thin skimrack, shooting stars

Falling, the long pale tracks behind them

Whitening through the darkness of the night;

And you’ll see straw and fallen leaves blowing.

But when it thunders in rough Boreas’ quarter,

When east and west it thunders—every sailor

Furls his dripping sail.

A storm should never catch you unprepared.

Aerial cranes take flight before its rising,

The restless heifer with dilated nostrils

Sniffs the air; the squeaking hirondelle

Flits round and round the lake, and frogs,

Inveterate in their mud, croak a chorale.

And too the ant, more frantic in his gallery,

Trundles his eggs out from their hiding place;

The rainbow, cloud imbiber, may be seen;

And crows go cawing from the pasture

In a harsh throng of crepitating wings;

The jeering jay gives out his yell for rain

And takes a walk by himself on the dry sand.

Stormwise, the various sea-fowl, and such birds

As grub the sweet Swan River in Asia,

May be observed dousing themselves and diving

Or riding on the water, as if they wished—

What odd exhilaration—to bathe themselves.

VII. After a storm, clear weather and continuing

Sunny days may likewise be foretold:

By the sharp twinkle of the stars, the moon

Rising to face her brother’s rays by day;

No tenuous fleeces blowing in the sky,

No halcyons, sea favorites, on the shore

Stretching out their wings in tepid sunlight;

But mists go lower and lie on the fields,

The owl, observing sundown from his perch,

Modulates his meaningless melancholy.

Aloft in crystal air the sparrow hawk

Chases his prey; and as she flits aside

The fierce hawk follows screaming on the wind,

And as he swoops, she flits aside again.

With funereal contractions of the windpipe

The crows produce their caws, three at a time,

And in their high nests, pleased at I know not what,

Noise it among themselves: no doubt rejoicing

To see their little brood after the storm,

But not, I think, by reason of divine

Insight or superior grasp of things.

VIII. But if you carefully watch the rapid sun

And the moon following, a fair night’s snare

Never deceives you as to next day’s weather.

When the new moon collects a rim of light,

If that bow be obscured with a dark vapor,

Then a great tempest is in preparation;

If it be blushing like a virgin’s cheek,

There will be wind; wind makes Diana blush;

If on the fourth night (most significant)

She goes pure and unclouded through the sky,

All that day and the following days will be,

For one full month, exempt from rain and wind.

The sun, too, rising and setting in the waves,

Will give you weather signs, trustworthy ones

Whether at morning or when stars come out.

A mackerel sky over the east at sunrise

Means look out for squalls, a gale is coming,

Unfavorable to trees and plants and flocks.

Or when through denser strata the sun’s rays

Break out dimly, or Aurora rises

Pale from Tithonus’ crocus-colored chamber,

Alas, the vine-leaf will not shield the cluster

In the hubbub of roof-pattering bitter hail.

It will be well to notice sunset, too,

For the sun’s visage then has various colors;

Bluish and dark means rain; if it be fiery

That means an East wind; if it be dappled

And mixed with red gold light, then you will see

Wind and rain in commotion everywhere.

Nobody can advise me, on that night,

To cast off hawsers and put out to sea.

But if the next day passes and the sunset

Then be clear, you need not fear the weather:

A bright Norther will sway the forest trees.

IX. Last, what the late dusk brings, and whence the fair

Clouds are blown, and secrets of the Southwind

You may learn from the sun, whose prophecies

No man denies, seeing black insurrections,

Treacheries, and wars are told by him.

When Caesar died, the great sun pitied Rome,

So veiling his bright head, the godless time

Trembled in fear of everlasting night;

And then were portents given of earth and ocean,

Vile dogs upon the roads, and hideous

Strange birds, and Aetna quaking, and her fires

Bursting to overflow the Cyclops’ fields

With flames whirled in the air and melted stones.

Thunder of war was heard in Germany

From south to north, shaking the granite Alps;

And a voice also through the silent groves

Piercing; and apparitions wondrous pale

Were seen in dead of night. Then cattle spoke

(O horror!), streams stood still, the earth cracked open

And tears sprang even from the temple bronze.

The Po, monarch of rivers, on his back

Spuming whole forests, raced through the lowland plains

And bore off pens and herds; and then continually

The viscera of beasts were thick with evil,

Blood trickled from the springs; tall towns at night

Re-echoed to the wolf-pack’s shivering howl;

And never from pure heaven have there fallen

So many fires, nor baleful comets burned.

It seemed that once again the Roman lines,

Alike in arms, would fight at Philippi;

And heaven permitted those Thessalian fields

To be enriched again with blood of ours.

Some future day, perhaps, in that country,

A farmer with his plow will turn the ground,

And find the javelins eaten thin with rust,

Or knock the empty helmets with his mattock

And wonder, digging up those ancient bones.

Paternal gods! Ancestors! Mother Vesta!

You that guard Tiber and the Palatine!

Now that long century is overthrown,

Let not this young man fail to give us peace!

Long enough beneath your rule, O Caesar,

Heaven has hated us and all those triumphs

Where justice was thrown down—so many wars,

So many kinds of wickedness! No honor

Rendered the plow, but the fields gone to ruin,

The country-folk made homeless, and their scythes

Beaten to straight swords on the blowing forge!

War from the Euphrates to Germany;

Ruptured engagements, violence of nations,

And impious Mars raging the whole world over—

As when a four horsed chariot rears away

Plunging from the barrier, and runs wild,

Heedless of the reins or the charioteer.

Terrorizers of themselves, laughers in

Language and priests of any mystery—

Not by authority.

What of the revered

Historian, the painstaking public man?

His dusty briefcase worn to a splitting bulge,

The scholar descending from the library

Smiles at the doves, and at the glowing grass.

Letters gone frail and yellow in their strings

Spill fuzz and dust from the stuck folds:

It might be inferred from what the ambassador

Wrote to his daughter in Virginia

That others were privy to the situation.

These judges are gentle and well-cultivated

Honorable stylists, penetrating men,

Mirrors of duplicity and bewilderment,

Mirrors of magnificent deep-rooted structural

Policy and implacable miscarriage.

The documents are all photostated, the files

Arranged. Let humane logic

Guide them in the wilderness of the State.

The pallid husbandman grunts at his fields,

Sells his new lambs in the damp of March,

Thumbs the slick catalogue of the mail order

House for ginghams for the girls of summer;

Chews with the county agent at the gate.

He will be ruddy as the sun goes over,

The clouds go over, the tractor shudders on

Through the high fields. The piling west will grow

Fractious with lightning, the wild branches bend,

Curtains blow out like goodbye handkerchiefs

Hilarious in the gloomy wind. Autumn

Comes with marriages to the aging house,

Winter comes with comforts and old death.

Still the farmer’s dull hand holds the seed;

The low star glimmers on the dewy sill.

Source: Spring Shade: Poems 1931-1970 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1971)