156
ALAN HELMS
necessary signpost, "the words will be gone, and the rusty earth and air /
Will have eaten the pole and nails." ("The Middle of Nowhere")
Though this sounds like latter-day
Four Quartets,
the sensibility
recorded in that image of a devouring nature is much closer to Frost's.
The image suggests some of the difficulities of survival in Wagoner's
world, as do titles like
Staying Alive, A Place to Stand, Working Against
Time
(the title he chose for the English edition of his selected poetry).
Life's odds are uneven, and its movement is less a matter of progress than
"persistence"; we're like the secondhand giveaway shoes "at St. Vincent
DePaul's" - - "free as long as they last." Yet survival doesn't necessarily
guarantee freedom, only more survival. Life is a "set of stages," each
faltering and instinct with the possibility of death or deeper darkness.
But though hope is thus "unreasonable," the same is ultimately true of
reason itself; and "unreasonable hope" is finally justified by the
occasional but actual miracle of human freedom:
The Makers of Rain
We sit at the top of the Pyramid of the Magician
Our last day in Uxmal, afraid
Of the sheer steps and the ranks of the rain gods,
The rows of Chacmuls in stone with their high-flung,
fanfaring noses.
Having guided ourselves this far, we look
At the ruined ball-court and, beyond, the iguanas basking
In the cracked fretwork of the Palace of the Governor,
The stone jaguars mating in the plaza
By the broken phallus, and with its jammed perspective,
the quadrangle
Where four classes of priests took charge of the rain.
Not even the Governors were allowed this high to lord it
Over the land from the mouth of the temple
Whose intricate facade is a Chacmul's face
Behind our backs. Not dar£ng to ask for a change in the deep sky,
We wait for our lives to topple
Like the rest, though our hands hold us together, balancing
Our love against the weight of evidence
That has caved in one whole side of this pyramid.
We are masters of no thing we survey,
But what the Magician did from here
--
chant with his arms
outstretched
Over a dying city or reach halfway to the clouds sailing aloof
