A LITTLE ANTHOLOCr
19
And the heart puts a fence around heaven
As snow a privacy over the least sparrow fallen ...
"Who'd bind the wound?"
"Cloth to cover terror!"
On this last hill strides that stranger and the voice
which is not to be stilled
The door opens and it stands there, horribly,
As the hungry of heaven have always stood.
KENNETH PATCHEN
Aesthetics
In
Our Time
How emptily-
the white t~wers fall, the printed parchments
rot within their stalls; the wood
eaten to death by worms: the words
you use to-day are yesterday's cliche,
the dancer in the mirror's prance;
the poem, the phrase, the image
shattered by shock of falling glass and rock!
To invent and circumvent, to hollow-not hallow
in the briefer intensity of leaner language,-
not fattened in the mind's ornate theatre,
of imagination's clownish arabesque
for journalistic quest;
not dulled by season, plant and sky-
to wallow, as if the world primped and primed
its rhetoric-for subtler tricks:
the dancer has left the scene,
the audience remains with the broken mirrors,-
the lights smashed by a blind spectator ....
HARRY ROSKOLENKO
