Fragment Of A Meditation

Not yet the thirtieth year, the thirtieth

Station where time reverses his light heels

To rim both ways, and makes of forward back;

Whose long coordinates are birth and death

And zero is the origin of breath:

Not yet the thirtieth year of gratitude,

Not yet suffering but a year's lack,

All thanks that mid-mortality is done,

That the new breath on the invisible track

Winds anciently into my father's blood.

In the beginning the irresponsible Verb

Connived with chaos whence I've seen it start

Riddles in the head for the nervous heart

To count its beat on: all beginnings run

Like water the easiest way or like birds

Fly on their cool imponderable flood.

Then suddenly the noon turns afternoon

And afternoon like an ill-written page

Will fade, until the very stain of light

Gathers in all the venom of the night-

The equilibrium of the thirtieth age.

The thirtieth, not yet the thirtieth year

Of wonders, revelations, whispers, signs:

Impartial dumb truths of sound and sight

Known beyond speech, immune to common fear.

Already the wind whistles the revelations

Of the time, but I'll go back seventy years

And more to the great Administrations:

Yet six had gone and all the public men

Whom doctrine and an evil nature made

Were only errand boys beaten by the sun

While Henry Adams fuddled in the shade.

I've heard what they said, in the running tap

Drawing water, their watery words, clear

Like a sad harlot's useless lucid pap

(I've heard the lion of S Street get his cheer),

I understood it, the general syllable

In a private ear, lost. . . .

                                  For who can tell

What the goat calls to the heifer, or the hen

Even to the cock her love? At thirty years

The years of the Christ, one will perceive, know,

Report new verity with a certain pen.

In the decade from eighteen-fifty-one

Where was Calhoun whose bristled intellect

Sumner the refined one did not admire?

I am convinced 'twas Calhoun who divined

How the great western star's last race would run

Unbridled round our personal defect,

Grinding its ash with engines of its mind.

"Too Southern and too simple," his death's head

Uttered a Dies Irae that last day

When Senator Mason in a voice to stun

Read off his speech; then put Calhoun to bed.

They put him in his grave. Does the worm say

In the close senate of tempestuous clay

That his intellect makes too difficult

The grave, as his enemies our life?

It's quiet there, for the worm's one fault

Is not discourtesy (give worms their dues)

In case the guest hurried by mortal strife

Enter the house in muddy overshoes.

It was a time of tributes; let me pay

Tribute to a man grandfather knew well

(Or so 'twas said, but one can never tell),

A stocky man but slight, no symmetry

Of face and eye, yet a distinction

Of the poet against the world; he dreamed the soul

Of the wide world and prodigies to come;

Exemplar of dignity, a gentleman

Who raised the black flag of the lower mind;

Hated in life by all; in death praised;

I cannot yet begin to understand

Why we are proud that an ancestor knew

The crazy Poe, who was not of our kind-

Bats in the belfry that round and round flew

In vapors not quite wholesome for the mind.

After Calhoun the local tenements

Of nature, tempered to the exigencies

Of air and fire, blurred with the public sense,

Diffused, while the Black Republicans

Took a short memory to their hot desire,

And honor turned a common entity

Crying decisions from the evening news.

Yet in a year, at thirty, one shall see

The wisdom of history, how she takes

Each epoch by the neck and, growling, shakes

It like a rat while she faintly mews.

Perhaps at the age of thirty one shall see

In the wide world the prodigies to come:

The long-gestating Christ, the Agnulus

Of time, got in the belly of Abstraction

By Ambition, a bull of pious use.

O Pasiphael mother of god, lest nature,

Peritonitis or morning sickness stunt

The growth of god in an unwholesome juice,

Eat cannon and cornflakes, that the lamb,

Spaceless as snow, may spare the rational earth

(Weary of prodigies and the Holy Runt)

A second prodigious, two-legged birth.

The signs and portents screaming in the air,

The nativity in my thirtieth year

Will glow in the heavens, the myriad fireflies

At the holy hour hovering round the house

Will stream in the night like flaming hair,

And man will scurry with averted eyes

Crouching, peering, silent, a drunken mouse.

The orange groves will blossom, the shining Sierras

Kindle all night far as Los Angeles;

With a noise, threatening, of wandering bees

Coining, angry with the air of their carouse,

The lamb through the sandpaper gates of life

(Made rougher by the bull's intenser strife)

Will leap, while the wild-eyed Pasiphae

By the inscrutable wrath of glory stung

Hears the Wise Men come swiftly from the sea.

The bull smoothly rolls his powerful tongue.