blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank
500 Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.
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.
510 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
520 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
530 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
540 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,
550 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.
560 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
570 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
580 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
590 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
600 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
610 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.
620 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
630 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
640 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
650 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?»
660 «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
670 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
680 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
690 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
700 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
710 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.
720 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
730 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.
740 Its constant vertical in triumph shone.
Often when troubled by the outer
