266
PARTISAN REVIEW
And could I leave the astonished oath unsaid
That stuck to my palate in a gagging lump?
Who could have told if he were live or dead?
Retreating sideways to a ragged clump
Of buckberry bushes in the vacant lot,
I looked more closely at the purple stump-
At the heart, three buttons down below the clot,
Then down to where, the rigid shanks depending,
Blue grass instead of feet grew in the slot.
"If
you live here," I said to the unbending
Citizen, "it will not seem to you
Improper if I linger on, defending
Myself from what I hate but ought to do
To put us in a fast ungreening grave
Together, lest you turn out to be true
And I publicly lose face." What could save
One's manly honor with the football coach–
My modest hybris, were I his known slave?
Our manners had no phrase to let me broach
To friends the secret of a friend gone lame.
How could I know this friend without reproach?
What a question! Whence the question came
I am still questing in the poor boy's curse,
Witching for water in a waste of shame.
Thence, flow! conceit and motion to rehearse
Pastoral terrors of youth still in the man,
Torsions of sleep, in emblematic verse
Rattling like dice unless the verse shall scan
All chance away; and let me touch the hem
Of him who spread his triptych like
.a
fan .
Meanwhile the scarecrow, man
all
coat and stem,
Neither dead nor living, never in this world–
In what worlds, or in what has essenced them,
I did not know until one day I whirled
Towards a suggesting presence in my room
And saw in the waving mirror (glass swirled
By old blowers) a black trunk without bloom-
Body that once had moved my face and feet.
