from Of Being Numerous

George Oppen

‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’

I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me

Have made poetry

To dream of that beach

For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

The absolute singular

The unearthly bonds

Of the singular

Which is the bright light of shipwreck

Strange that the youngest people I know

Live in the oldest buildings

Scattered about the city

In the dark rooms

Of the past—and the immigrants,

The black

Rectangular buildings

Of the immigrants.

They are the children of the middle class.

‘The pure products of America—’

Investing

The ancient buildings

Jostle each other

In the half-forgotten, that ponderous business.

This Chinese Wall.

They carry nativeness

To a conclusion

In suicide.

We want to defend

Limitation

And do not know how.

Stupid to say merely

That poets should not lead their lives

Among poets,

They have lost the metaphysical sense

Of the future, they feel themselves

The end of a chain

Of lives, single lives

And we know that lives

Are single

And cannot defend

The metaphysic

On which rest

The boundaries

Of our distances.

We want to say

‘Common sense’

And cannot. We stand on

That denial

Of death that paved the cities,

Paved the cities

Generation

For generation and the pavement

Is filthy as the corridors

Of the police.

How shall one know a generation, a new generation?

Not by the dew on them! Where the earth is most torn

And the wounds untended and the voices confused,

There is the head of the moving column

Who if they cannot find

Their generation

Wither in the infirmaries

And the supply depots, supplying

Irrelevant objects.

Street lamps shine on the parked cars

Steadily in the clear night

It is true the great mineral silence

Vibrates, hums, a process

Completing itself

In which the windshield wipers

Of the cars are visible.

The power of the mind, the

Power and weight

Of the mind which

Is not enough, it is nothing

And does nothing

Against the natural world,

Behemoth, white whale, beast

They will say and less than beast,

The fatal rock

Which is the world—

O if the streets

Seem bright enough,

Fold within fold

Of residence ...

Or see thru water

Clearly the pebbles

Of the beach

Thru the water, flowing

From the ripple, clear

As ever they have been

My daughter, my daughter, what can I say

Of living?

I cannot judge it.

We seem caught

In reality together my lovely

Daughter,

I have a daughter

But no child

And it was not precisely

happiness we promised

Ourselves;

We say happiness, happiness and are not

Satisfied.

Tho the house on the low land

Of the city

Catches the dawn light

I can tell myself, and I tell myself

Only what we all believe

True

And in the sudden vacuum

Of time ...

... is it not

In fear the roots grip

Downward

And beget

The baffling hierarchies

Of father and child

As of leaves on their high

Thin twigs to shield us

From time, from open

Time

404

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Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning

But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?
Oh, I'll content him,—but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think,
This evening more than usual, and it seems
As if—forgive now—should you let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,