Harold Rosenberg
354
THE UNLEARNING
Pistol: Old I
do
wax, and from my weary limbs
Honor
is
cudgelled
I.
Who loves life is cunning: Odysseus,
For instance, of all the Greeks
Most lustful of duration, therefore most subtle;
No singing he did not hear, no luxury
Not abandoned, out of love of life;
Escapist, worshipper, classical Jacob; shrewd
And with a final bed. Or Socrates-
The mirror of our age is loneliness
And non-being; and flocks walk down in it
And disappear. Here the ego, that illusion,
Has no grapple with the earth,
But finds glory absolute
In passing neatly from one phase
To another of power. While the flesh,
Hairy impediment, puts by its avarice
For the pure costume of the public role.
If
ranks of young men their arms linked together
In comradeship of the blank sky
And the wordless joy of muscles
Deploy like dancers in the breathless meadows,
Also husbands with mustaches
Without a quaver after ripeness
Leap, sunstruck, into a handful of air–
This is not man in his stoutness evolved
To elegance and honor. It is rather
As if a football lifted itself off a table
And took flight through a broken window.
Pure and plastic, transparent and crying aloud
They run, squirting fire from toys,
