838
PARTISAN REVIEW
So there it rests the clump of flowers,
Suspension bridge and talisman,
Not
his
nor hers nor yours nor ours
But everyone's and no one's,
Against the light, flanked by the curtains
No draught nor chatter can discompose
For this is a window we cannot open
A hair's breadth more, this is a window
Impossible to close.
Thus pictures (windows themselves) preclude
Both ventilation and burglary-
No entrance to their solitude,
No egress to adventure,
For life that lives from mind to moment,
From mouth to mouth, from none to now,
Must never, they say, infringe that circle,
At most may sense it at a tangent
And without knowing how.
II
How, yes how! To achieve in a world of flux and bonfires
Something of art's coherence,
in
a world of wind and hinges
An even approximate poise, in a world of beds and hunger
A fullness more than the feeding a sieve?
For the windows here admit draughts and the bridges may not be
loitered on
And what was ecstasy there would be quietism here and the people
Here have to live.
Beginning your life with an overdraft, born looking out on a surge
of eroding
Objects, your cradle a coracle, your eyes when they start to focus
Traitors to the king within you, born in the shadow of an hour-glass
But vertical (this is not art),
We feel like the tides the tug of a moon, never to be reached,
interfering always,
