44
PARTISAN REVIEW
At any filling station or small-town movie
We pulled on tunics, took the company
pose.
Our factions rose and fell in opposing bleachers
On amber afternoons offrosty October.
All men were neither tigers nor our brothers.
All our lives were not divisions in charts.
All orators were not exclusively for us.
All countries oversea were distant to us as death.
III
When night has cast his dreadful shade
And the great sphere inclines
Eastward and weightless, grade by grade
Sacred Arcturus shines.
And cold as starlight through the grove
Where summer's windrows lie
The gliding firefly shines on love
\
With phosphorescent thigh.
But eastward where vast history wanes
The dust-cloud armies gleam
And Europe's dark magnetic plains
Glow under nodes of dream,
Whose ether fever's rippling prayer
Breaks on our Western sill.
Through all the sighing lands the fair
Sleepers will not be still.
IV
And the rifle butt falls on the shore
By the quiet path where yesterday's
Immaculate questioners
Tracked down desire. Think, child,
All that is done without remorse
In this sensuous summer dusk
Was ·dreamed then by the seedy dreamers.
0 lakes where the green glaciers sleep,
0 mountains fuming cloud,
Be mindful, remember their
b~ndage.
