PAtRTISAN REVIEW
So [Audubon] died in his bed, and
Night leaned, and now leans,
Off the Atlantic, and
is
on schedule.
Grass does not bend beneath that enormous weight
That with no sound sweeps westward. In the Mississippi,
On a mud bank, the wreck of a great tree, left
By flood, lies, the root-system and now-stubbed boughs
Lifting in darkness. It
Is white as bone. That whiteness
Is reflected in dark water, and a star
Thereby.
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We're told that Audubon "knew the lust of the eye," and in this kind
of visual composition Warren makes us believe it.
Or
with perceptions
like: "the bear, / Daft in the honey-light, yawns."
Audubon
is finally
Robert Penn Warren's vision, and his eye and his voice teach us a new
affection for the world.
In Diane Wakoski's
The George Washington Poems
a nameless
"you" is addressed but the relationship adduced to the world is a bitter
one. The discontinuity of America, of George Washington to our present,
is imaged as one of the failures of love. George Washington is present
only in that national parody we pass off as history: George Washington
Slept Here, The Cherry Tree, Martha. The distances separating now
from then, myth from reality, are not visionary, no, not even that. We
learn that the speaker's father, her husband, her lover, have all left her.
And so has the type of all of them, George Washington. Yet the fact
that there
is
a type works to offset the dislocations of her life. The ex–
pression of those dislocations is part of the great strength of these poems:
}fere in this place
rou ar:d I slept. We dreamed
zn umson
of the grey battleships
They came secretly into the harbor
and in fatigues you watched them lining up
cannons, missiles, the accoutrements
of war.
But a pair of red shoes
stained red from a gaping hole in my arm
was sitting on deck
tiny, pointed, high-heeled,
and the gunners could not miss them,
threw them
overboard.
But because "George Washington Slept Here" (the name of this poem),
another and more promising kind of talk is possible:
