The Blue Swallows

Across the millstream below the bridge

Seven blue swallows divide the air

In shapes invisible and evanescent,

Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s

Or memory’s power to keep them there.

“History is where tensions were,”

“Form is the diagram of forces.”

Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge,

While gazing down upon those birds—

How strange, to be above the birds!—

Thus helplessly the mind in its brain

Weaves up relation’s spindrift web,

Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs

Dipped in invisible ink, writing…

Poor mind, what would you have them write?

Some cabalistic history

Whose authorship you might ascribe

To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost,

You’ve capitalized your Self enough.

That villainous William of Occam

Cut out the feet from under that dream

Some seven centuries ago.

It’s taken that long for the mind

To waken, yawn and stretch, to see

With opened eyes emptied of speech

The real world where the spelling mind

Imposes with its grammar book

Unreal relations on the blue

Swallows. Perhaps when you will have

Fully awakened, I shall show you

A new thing: even the water

Flowing away beneath those birds

Will fail to reflect their flying forms,

And the eyes that see become as stones

Whence never tears shall fall again.

O swallows, swallows, poems are not

The point. Finding again the world,

That is the point, where loveliness

Adorns intelligible things

Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York. He died of cancer at his home in University City, Missouri on July 5th 1991.