270
PARTISAN REVIEW
And no longer shoe geese or water stakes but
Bolt in my day my grain of truth to the barn
Where tribulations may leap
With their long-lost brothers at last in the festival
Of which not one has a dissenting image, and the
Flushed immediacy sleep.
Knowing myself a mobile creature, descended
From an ancient line of respectable fish,
With a certain
mecha:nt
charm,
Occuping the earth for a grass-grown interval between
Two oscillations of polar ice, engaged in weaving
His conscience upon its calm.
Despising Now yet afraid of Hereafter,
Unable in spite of his stop-watch and lens
To imagine the rising Rome
To which his tools and tales migrate, to guess from what shore
The signal will flash, to observe the anarchist's gestation
In the smug constricted home.
Into this city from the shining lowlands
Blows a wind that whispers of uncovered skulls
And fresh ruins under the moon,
Of hopes that will not survive the
secousse
of this spring,
Of blood and flames, of the terror that walks by night and
The sickness that strikes at noon.
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling; make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
Because the darkness is never so distant,
And there is never much time for the arrogant
Spirit to flutter its wings,
Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry
For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author
And giver of all good things.
