Message From Abroad

To Andrew Lytle

Paris, November 1929

Their faces are bony and sharp but very red, although

their ancestors nearly two hundred years have dwelt

by the miasmal banks of tidewaters where malarial fever

makes men gaunt and dosing with quinine shakes them

as with a palsy. Traveller to America (1799).

I

What years of the other times, what centuries

Broken, divided up and claimed? A few

Here and there to the taste, in vigilance

Ceaseless, but now a little stale, to keep us

Fearless, not worried as the hare scurrying

Without memory . . .

                                        Provence,

The Renascence, the age of Pericles, each

A broad, rich-carpeted stair to pride

With manhood now the cost-they're easy to follow

For the ways taken are all notorious,

Lettered, sculptured, and rhymed;

Those others, incuriously complete, lost,

Not by poetry and statues timed,

Shattered by sunlight and the impartial sleet.

What years . . . What centuries . . .

                                      Now only

The bent eaves and the windows cracked,

The thin grass picked by the wind,

Heaved by the mole; the hollow pine that

Screams in the latest storm-these,

These emblems of twilight have we seen at length,

And the man red-faced and tall seen, leaning

In the day of his strength

Not as a pine, but the stiff form

Against the west pillar,

Hearing the ox-cart in the street-

His shadow gliding, a long nigger

Gliding at his feet.

II

Wanderers to the east, wanderers west:

I followed the cold northern track,

The sleet sprinkled the sea;

The dim foam mounted

The night, the ship mounted

The depths of night-

How absolute the sea!

With dawn came the gull to the crest,

Stared at the spray, fell asleep

Over the picked bones, the white face

Of the leaning man drowned deep;

The red-faced man, ceased wandering,

Never came to the boulevards

Nor covertly spat in the sawdust

Sunk in his collar

Shuffling the cards;

The man with the red face, the stiff back,

I cannot see in the rainfall

Down Saint-Michel by the quays,

At the corner the wind speaking

Destiny, the four ways.

III

I cannot see you

The incorruptibles,

Yours was a secret fate,

The stiff-backed liars, the dupes:

The universal blue

Of heaven rots,

Your anger is out of date-

What did you say mornings?

Evenings, what?

The bent eaves

On the cracked house,

That ghost of a hound. . . .

The man red-faced and tall

Will cast no shadow

From the province of the drowned.