POEMS
Sits near the altar. There's no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with its heavy eyelids.
As
before,
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque decor,
Expressionless, expresses God: it goes
Past castled Sian. She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary's Cross or crib at Bethlehem
Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.
VI
•
The empty winds are creaking and the oak
Loosens a snow-slide on the blacked-out hearse,
The boughs are trembling in the snow-wrapt winter's
Wailing, perhaps for the untimely stroke
Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell
In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It's well;
Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,
Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:
Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh,
Mart once of supercilious, wing'd clippers,
Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil,
The sailor sprawls in the struck ship's crude oil
And you could cut the oiled winds with a knife
Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time
When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life;
And blue-lunged Borsas lumbers to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
RoBERT LowELL
1}3
