648
PARTISAN REVIEW
The glory of his form, delicate organism,
Not small any more, but raw now, and cleaving,
Right there, to the bare bone of creation.
- from "Coral Snake"
But this is hardly the conventional Middleton mode. We are
more likely to find an accelerated, compacted idiom, as in this sec–
tion from the long poem "Rilke's Feet":
Or Rilke had no feet at all
What he had was fins
Up he twiddles into the air
Sycamore seed going the wrong way
Lands in my tree
Owl's eyes large liquid
Blink at me Contrariwise
He has no body just a head
Thought a little girl
No body in his clean but threadbare
Clothes crossed the room
And took a cake with Mama later
Off again
Somehow bowing
Where can he have put that cake
Middleton is playing, but as anyone who has been a child can tell
you, there is nothing more serious than play. In these fleet fifteen
lines he finds both the truth and the absurdity within the popular im–
age of the incorporeal poet. The vertical liberation, moving through
rapid conversions from aqueous fins, to airborne propulsion, to the
copter rotations of the sycamore seed, to the gathered stillness of the
owl's blinking eyes is decisively joined to the droll imagining of the
little girl- Rilke has gone from having no feet to having no body at
all. The clever aptness of "Somehow bowing" puts the final spin on
the passage.
In truth, there is no "conventional Middleton mode." Poems, as
he wrote in his essay volume,
Bolshevism in Art
(Carcanet, 1978), are
"active structures of eccentric feeling." Middleton's poems are flow-
