Spencer Brown
MY FATHE ,R'S BUSINESS
By day keeping bleak books, by night my father
Wrote black manna-words for snowy newspapers
Dawn-fresh, noon-gray, by evening trash,
So I might in my youth read other books
That his untutored years could not translate.
Though my life slew him, yet he trusted me.
Now in mid-journey I cannot jettison
His legacy, hidden, heavy, unlikely,
His twig of laurel borne in hope of need.
My friends, who long since lost theirs, go ungalled
By the ugly itch and running sore, renown.
But my new eyes still focus as a stranger's,
See trees as men talking, stars as bombs.
And though I understand your speech, good friends,
And without speech the shudder of your dreams,
I cannot know you: no abhorred shears,
Only a sword lies between you and life.
If
I tread on earth unguessed at, bitter so.
And if almost beyond hope my white ghost
Marvels at the next age's marble praise,
And another in language not too unlike mine,
Untwists my lines to say in remote love,
"Such is thy song to me, divine poet"–
Nevertheless I write past the noon of man
And my words will, like my father's, blow about
The windy streets or desert slag at nightfall.
I use a language he cannot translate
Or even hear, not if I had bronze lungs,
A hundred mouths, and a hundred thousand tongues.
