III
He has fled like electricity down the telegraph wires into prairies
of distance where the single bird
sits
small and black against
the saffron sky, and is itself.
He has fled like the glitter of glory down the April-wet
rails,
toward sunset.
He has fled like the wild goose, north-beaked and star-treading,
with night-hoot too high to
be
heard by whoever stands
now to brood where the last, lost spur of the Canadian
Pacific ends.
*
He has retired into the cold chemical combustion where water
at last probes the fibres of the creosote-treated cross ties.
He has. retired where the acrid sap of red oak
rises
under the
iron bark, and he does not now scream at the saw-bite.
He has retired into the delectable crystallization of sugar in
grape jelly stored twenty years in a cellar, in a Burgundian
drowse.
*
He has propounded a theorem the refutation of which would
devalue all our anguish.
He has broken past atmospheres where the lungs breathe rare–
faction of revelation and the head reels, like Truth.
He has explored a calculus of your unexpected probability, and
what now is was never probable, but only is,
*
For we are in the world and nothing is good enough,
Which is
to
say tha,t the world is here and we are not good
enough,
And we live in the world and the world continues to live in us,
Despite all we can do to eject it utterly, including
this
particular
recollection, which now I would eject, reject, but cannot.
Robert Penn Warren
