END OF A WORLD
And we who were warned, like Noah, floated
Upright on that sea, and saw the broken
Pieces of our world bobbing past us,
Saw the contents of History's tied shops
Spread on the flood untidily, saw all
The bric-a-brac, the crates of government
Tumbled out, old boxes of tricks, ends, means,
Poses and properties, plumes, palliums,
Exact dignity, calculated
a~e,
The props and backdrops of authority
-We saw them all swept past us. There sprawled
The dead diplomat, inseparable
On his finger-end the skeleton-keys
Of compromise and ambiguity.
There too floated the drowned scholar, his hand
Holding his pat reference and apt tag,
Index and document, his subscription
To Authority. There danced the landsman who
Collected sea-birds' eggs and sailors' slang,
The expert alpinist bed-rid from birth,
The strategist who never met his gun,
The record-keepers of record-breakers,
The lackers and onlookers of greatness,
Eunuch students of love and peeping Toms,
Caretakers of leapfrogging pedigrees
-All were there, all the tasters and testers
Of things rare, intricate, antique, lofty,
Exotic, difficult, all who had sieved
The theory from the practice, the fancy
From the fact, the seekers and abstractors
Of size, shape, surface, sound-all who kept pure
The exquisite equation of self, all
Fallen to pieces like a jogged jig-saw,
The end of a world witty and heartless.
And we, only, were left, a plain people
Without name or memory, lifted up
On the obliterating back of doom.
But floods divided, dropped, and brought to view
355
