BOOKS
677
memory all the knots in the
Boy Scout Handbook.
Waking in fear one night,
he counts over the list of knots he knows:
His fingers were all twisted in the sheet
and he could hear
his
own voice in the dark
far away, saying over the names of knots:
throat seizing, timber hi tch, lark's head, eat's paw.
And all the rest, and none of them of much
use in the darkness he was camped in now.
John Peck's
Selva Morale
is the most ambitious in scope and the most
intellectually challenging of these books. Two adjacent poems capture the
dominant notes. In "To an Unknown Poet" a young Roman of the time
of Septimus Severus, who claimed to be the adopted son of Marcus
Aurelius, watches Nubian captives dance for the Emperor at Lupercal:
Watching firelight leapers
at Lupercal, studying the limbs
of Africans, a boy
felt the thud and whinny of his calling
when he saw that the arm's melody
phrased pain, and that the planting
and uprooting of the foot, too, grew pain.
Prattle of embassies
and decay downward
were evidence for others,
his sense of it felt simpler: language had gone out with
ox teaJns, keels,
chisels across the lintels of grafted gods,
while something less had come back.
Mortared a world while the lime in it drifted sand
and the sand whispered of foreshores, of time,
not qui te in one moment, or from one place.
All this on a glistening
Nubian twisting for Severus
under the Fool's weaving chant.
Watching the dancers, the young poet suddenly understands that the
dance has syntax and meaning, and this insight into the pain the dancers
