Our age bereft of nobility How can our faces show it? I look for love. My lips stand out dry and cracked with want of it. Oh it is well. My poem shall show the need for it.
As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!
I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together
Out of the golden West, out of the leaden East, into the iron South, and to the silver North . . . Oh metals metals everywhere, forks and knives, belt buckles and hooks . . . When you are beaten you sing. You do not give anyone a chance . . .
You come out of the earth and fly with men. You lodge in men. You hurt them terribly. You tear them. You do not care for anyone.
Oh metals metals, why are you always hanging about? Is it not enough that you hold men’s wrists? Is it not enough that we let you in our mouths?
Why is it you will not do anything for yourself? Why is it you always wait for men to show you what to be?
And men love you. Perhaps it is because you soften so often. You did, it is true, pour into anything men asked you to. It has always proved you to be somewhat softer than you really are.
Oh metals metals, why are you always filling my house? You are like family, you do not care for anyone.
The houses I had they took away from me. The times happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile; sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds, sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting was good in my time, many felt the pellet; the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.
1 As I ebb’d with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.
Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows, Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten, Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide, Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
In cities there are tangerine briefcases on the down-platform and jet parkas on the up-platform; in the mother of cities there is equal anxiety at all terminals. West a business breast, North a morose jig, East a false escape, South steam in milk.
The centres of cities move westwards; the centre of the mother of cities has disappeared. North the great cat, East the great water, South the great fire, West the great arrow.
In cities the sons of women become fathers; in the mother of cities the daughters of men have failed to become mothers. East the uneager fingers, South the damp cave, West the chained ankle, North the rehearsed cry.
1 Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
1 Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
2 The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
When the windows of the West Side clash like cymbals in the setting sunlight, And when wind wails amid the East Side’s aerials, And when, both north and south of thirty-fourth street, In all the dizzy buildings, The elevators clack their teeth and rattle the bars of their cages, Then the children of the city, Leaving the monkey-houses of their office-buildings and apartments,
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