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Canto Three

L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais: The grand potato.                    I.P.H., a lay Institute (I) of Preparation (P) For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we Called it — big if! — engaged me for one term To speak on death («to lecture on the Worm,» Wrote President McAber).                              You and I, And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye To Yewshade, in another, higher state.  I love great mountains. From the iron gate Of the ramshackle house we rented there One saw a snowy form, so far, so fair, That one could only fetch a sigh, as if It might assist assimilation.                               Iph Was a larvorium and a violet: A grave in Reason's early spring. And yet It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed What mostly interests the preterist; For we die every day; oblivion thrives  Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files. I'm ready to become a floweret Or a fat fly, but never, to forget. And I'll turn down eternity unless The melancholy and the tenderness Of mortal life; the passion and the pain; The claret taillight of that dwindling plane Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay  On running out of cigarettes; the way You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme, This index card, this slender rubber band Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, Are found in Heaven by the newlydead Stored in its strongholds through the years.                                          Instead The Institute assumed it might be wise Not to expect too much of paradise: What if there's nobody to say hullo  To the newcomer, no reception, no Indoctrination? What if you are tossed Into a boundless void, your bearings lost, Your spirit stripped and utterly alone, Your task unfinished, your despair unknown, Your body just beginning to putresce, A non-undressable in morning dress, Your widow lying prone on a dim bed, Herself a blur in your dissolving head! While snubbing gods, including the big G,  Iph borrowed some peripheral debris From mystic visions; and it offered tips (The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) — How not to panic when you're made a ghost: Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast, Meet solid bodies and glissade right through, Or let a person circulate through you. How to locate in blackness, with a gasp, Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp. How to keep sane in spiral types of space.  Precautions to be taken in the case Of freak reincarnation: what to do On suddenly discovering that you Are now a young and vulnerable toad Plump in the middle of a busy road, Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine, Or a book mite in a revived divine. Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment. We give advice  To widower. He has been married twice: He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both Jealous of one another. Time means growth, And growth means nothing in Elysian life. Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond Full of a dreamy sky. And, also blond, But with a touch of tawny in the shade, Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone balustrade The other sits and raises a moist gaze  Toward the blue impenetrable haze. How to begin? Which first to kiss? What toy To give the babe? Does that small solemn boy Know of the head-on crash which on a wild March night killed both the mother and the child? And she, the second love, with instep bare In ballerina black, why does she wear The earrings from the other's jewel case? And why does she avert her fierce young face? For as we know from dreams it is so hard  To speak to our dear dead! They disregard Our apprehension, queaziness and shame — The awful sense that they're not quite the same. And our school chum killed in a distant war Is not surprised to see us at his door, And in a blend of jauntiness and gloom Points at the puddles in his basement room. But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-call When morning finds us marching to the wall Under the stage direction of some goon  Political, some uniformed baboon? We'll think of matters only known to us — Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus; Listen to distant cocks crow, and discern Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern; And while our royal hands are being tied, Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride The dedicated imbeciles, and spit Into their eyes just for the fun of it. Nor can one help the exile, the old man  Dying in a motel, with the loud fan Revolving in the torrid prairie night And, from the outside, bits of colored light Reaching his bed like dark hands from the past Offering gems; and death is coming fast. He suffocates and conjures in two tongues The nebulae dilating in his lungs. A wrench, a rift — that's all one can foresee. Maybe one finds le grand néant; maybe Again one spirals from the tuber's eye.  As you remarked the last time we went by The Institute: «I really could not tell The difference between this place and Hell.» We heard cremationists guffaw and snort At Grabermann's denouncing the Retort As detrimental to the birth of wraiths. We all avoided criticizing faiths. The great Starover Blue reviewed the role Planets had played as landfalls of the soul. The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese  Discanted on the etiquette at teas With ancestors, and how far up to go. I tore apart the fantasies of Poe, And dealt with childhood memories of strange Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range. Among our auditors were a young priest And an old Communist. Iph could at least Compete with churches and the party line. In later years it started to decline: Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in  Pale jellies and a floating mandolin. Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept All is allowed, into some classes crept; And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb, A school of Freudians headed for the tomb. That tasteless venture helped me in a way. I learnt what to ignore in my survey Of death's abyss. And when we lost our child I knew there would be nothing: no self-styled Spirit would touch a keyboard of dry wood  To rap out her pet name; no phantom would Rise gracefully to welcome you and me In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree. «What is that funny creaking — do you hear?» «It is the shutter on the stairs, my dear.» «If you're not sleeping, let's turn on the light. I hate that wind! Let's play some chess.» «All right.» «I'm sure it's not the shutter. There — again.» «It is a tendril fingering the pane.» «What glided down the roof and made that thud?»  «It is old winter tumbling in the mud.» «And now what shall I do? My knight is pinned.» Who rides so late in the night and the wind? It is the writer's grief. It is the wild March wind. It is the father with his child. Later came minutes, hours, whole days at last, When she'd be absent from our thoughts, so fast Did life, the woolly caterpillar run. We went to Italy. Sprawled in the sun On a white beach with other pink or brown  Americans. Flew back to our small town. Found that my bunch of essays The Untamed Seahorse was «universally acclaimed» (It sold three hundred copies in one year). Again school started, and on hillsides, where Wound distant roads, one saw the steady stream Of carlights all returning to the dream Of college education. You went on Translating into French Marvell and Donne. It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane  Lolita swept from Florida to Maine. Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied. Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. The Crashaw Club had paid me to discuss Why Poetry Is Meaningful To Us. I gave my sermon, a dull thing but short. As I was leaving in some haste, to thwart The so-called «question period» at the end, One of those peevish people who attend Such talks only to say they disagree  Stood up and pointed his pipe at me. And then it happened — the attack, the trance, Or one of my old fits. There sat by chance A doctor in the front row. At his feet Patly I fell. My heart had stopped to beat, It seems, and several moments passed before It heaved and went on trudging to a more Conclusive destination. Give me now Your full attention.                     I can't tell you how I knew — but I did know that I had crossed  The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. I realized, of course, that it was made Not of our atoms; that the sense behind  The scene was not our sense. In life, the mind Of any man is quick to recognize Natural shams, and then before his eyes The reed becomes a bird, the knobby twig An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big Wickedly folded moth. But in the case Of my white fountain what it did replace Perceptually was something that, I felt, Could be grasped only by whoever dwelt In the strange world where I was a mere stray.  And presently I saw it melt away: Though still unconscious I was back on earth. The tale I told provoked my doctor's mirth. He doubted very much that in the state He found me in «one could hallucinate Or dream in any sense. Later, perhaps, But not during the actual collapse. No, Mr. Shade.»                  But, Doctor, I was dead! He smiled. «Not quite: just half a shade,» he said. However, I demurred. In mind I kept  Replaying the whole thing. Again I stepped Down from the platform, and felt strange and hot, And saw that chap stand up, and toppled, not Because a heckler pointed with his pipe, But probably because the time was ripe For just that bump and wobble on the part Of a limp blimp, an old unstable heart. My vision reeked with truth. It had the tone, The quiddity and quaintness of its own Reality. It was. As time went on.  Its constant vertical in triumph shone. Often when troubled by the outer glare Of street and strife, inward I'd turn, and there, There in the background of my soul it stood, Old Faithful! And its presence always would Console me wonderfully. Then, one day, I came across what seemed a twin display. It was a story in a magazine About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.  She told her interviewer of «The Land Beyond the Veil» and the account contained A hint of angels, and a glint of stained Windows, and some soft music, and a choice Of hymnal items, and her mother's voice; But at the end she mentioned a remote Landscape, a hazy orchard — and I quote: «Beyond that orchard through a kind of smoke I glimpsed a tall white fountain — and awoke.» If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt  Sees a new animal and captures it, And if, a little later, Captain Smith Brings back a skin, that island is no myth. Our fountain was a signpost and a mark Objectively enduring in the dark, Strong as a bone, substantial as tooth, And almost vulgar in its robust truth! The article was by Jim Coates. To Jim Forthwith I wrote. Got her address from him. Drove west three hundred miles to talk to her.  Arrived. Was met by an impassioned purr. Saw that blue hair, those freckled hands, that rapt Orchideous air — and knew that I was trapped. «Who'd miss an opportunity to meet A poet so distinguished?» It was sweet Of me to come! I desperately tried To ask my questions. They were brushed aside: «Perhaps some other time.» The journalist Still had her scribblings. I should not insist. She plied me with fruit cake, turning it all  Into an idiotic social call. «I can't believe,» she said, «that it is you! I loved your poem in the Blue Review. That one about Mon Blon. I have a niece Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece I could not understand. I mean the sense. Because, of course, the sound — But I'm so dense!» She was. I might have persevered. I might Have made her tell me more about the white Fountain we both had seen «beyond the veil»  But if (I thought) I mentioned that detail She'd pounce upon it as upon a fond Affinity, a sacramental bond, Uniting mystically her and me, And in a jiffy our two souls would be Brother and sister trembling on the brink Of tender incest. «Well,» I said, «I think It's getting late…»                   I also called on Coates. He was afraid he had mislaid her notes. He took his article from a steel file:  «It's accurate. I have not changed her style. There's one misprint — not that it matters much: Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch.» Life Everlasting — based on a misprint! I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint, And stop investigating my abyss? But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But a topsy-turvical coincidence,  Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found. It did not matter who they were. No sound, No furtive light came from their involute Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute, Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns  To ivory unicorns and ebony fauns; Kindling a long life here, extinguishing A short one there; killing a Balkan king; Causing a chunk of ice formed on a high- Flying airplane to plummet from the sky And strike a farmer dead; hiding my keys, Glasses or pipe. Coordinating these Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.  Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is My firm conviction — «Darling, shut the door. Had a nice trip?» Splendid — but what is more I have returned convinced that I can grope My way to some — to some — «Yes, dear?» Faint hope.