AT THE GRAVE OF HENRY JAMES
As I stand awake on our solar fabric,
That primary machine, the earth, which gendarmes, banks,
And aspirin presuppose,
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On which the clumsy and sad may all sit down, and any who will
Say their a-ha to the beautiful, the common locus
Of the master and the rose.
Our theatre, scaffold, and erotic city,
Where all the infirm species are partners in the act
Of encroachment bodies crave,
Though solitude in death is
de rigeur
for their flesh,
And the self-denying hermit flies as it approaches
Like the carnivore to a cave.
That its plural numbers may unite in meaning,
Its vulgar tongues unravel the knotted mass
Of the improperly conjunct,
Open my eyes now to its hinted significant figures,
Sharpen my ears to detect amid its brilliant uproar,
The low thud of the defunct.
0 dwell ironic at my living centre,
Half ancestor, half child; because the actual self
Round whom time revolves so fast
Is so afraid of what its motions might possibly do,
That the actor is never there when his really important
Acts happen. Only the past
Is present, no one about but the dead as,
Equipped with a few inherited odds and ends,
One after another we are
Fired into life to seek that unseen target where all
Our equivocal judgments are judged and resolved in
One whole alas or hurrah.
And only the unborn remark the disaster
When, though it makes no difference to the pretty airs
The bird of Appetite sings,
And Amour Propre is his usual amusing self,
