FIRST POEM
887
one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is
an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope,
and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's
natural members. A philosophical friend of mine in later years used
to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point
of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wand-like pencil, and at
the same instant a car (New Yark license plate) passes along the
road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old
man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey
sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in
Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles
occur-all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of
events, of which the poet is the nucleus.
That summer I was still far too young to evolve any wealth of
"cosmic synchronization" (to quote my philosopher again). But I
did discover at least that a person hoping to become a poet must
have the capacity of thinking of several things at the same time. In
the course of the languid rambles that accompanied the making of
my first poem, I ran into the village schoolmaster, an ardent socialist,
a good man, intensely devoted to my father (who had had the school
rebuilt on modem lines), always with a tight posy of wild flowers,
always smiling, always perspiring. While politely discussing with him
my father's sudden journey to town, I registered simultaneously and
with equal clarity not only his wilting flowers, his flowing tie and
the blackheads on the fleshy volutes of his nostrils, but also the dull
little voice of a cuckoo coming from afar and the remembered im–
pression of the pictures (enlarged agricultural pests and bearded Rus–
sian writers) in the well aerated classrooms of the village school
which I had once or twice visited; and- to continue a tabulation
which hardly does justice to the ethereal simplicity of the whole
process-the flash of some utterly irrelevant recollection (a pedome–
ter I had lost) was released from a neighboring brain cell, and the
savor of the grass stalk I was chewing mingled with the cuckoo's note,
and all the while I was richly, serenely aware of my own manifold
awareness.
He beamed and he bowed (in the effusive manner of a Russian
radical) and took a couple of steps backward, and turned, and
