148
DAVID KALSTONE
between fantasy and the commonplace. So, "Time," the best of the book's
short poems, incorporates fragments of daily demands, for one thing,
the way a son hears a feeble father:
He grasped your pulse in his big gray-haired hand,
Crevasses opening, numb azure.
Wait
He breathed and glittered:
You'll regret
You want to Read my will first Don't
Your old father All he has
Be yours
But these voices are part of an already complicated vision whose initial
picture of Time is more seductive: "Ever that Everest / Among con–
cepts." That promise of adventure transforms games of Patience into
"flfty-two chromosomes permitting / Trillions of 'lives.'''
You could inquire beneath
The snowfield, the vine-monogram, the pattern
Of winged cyclists, to where the flaw lay
Crocus-clean, a trail inching between
Sheer heights and drops, and reach what might have been.
Against these fantasies play the voices of the possible-the feeble father,
the postponing son. The emerging vision-still cards, still mountain–
climbing-is now tempered, informed by the long littleness of life. Rich
imaginings about time have been tested against neglect and procrastin–
ation:
You take up your worn pack.
Above their gay crusaders' dress
The monarchs' mouths are pinched and bleak.
Staggering forth in ranks of less and less
Related cards, condemned to the mystique
Of a redeeming One,
An Ace to lead them home, sword, stave, and axe,
Power, Riches, Love, a place to lay them down
In dreamless heaps, the reds, the blacks,
Old Adams and gray Eves
Escort you still.
The technique, here as elsewhere, is one of bold transformations; the
"worn pack" of eternal games of cards merges with the mountain–
climber's burden. And here one comes to the special strangeness of Mer-
l
rill's style, its taut alertness to meanings that lurk in words and phrases
•
one casually comes upon. One finds this in all good poets, but here raised
