Point Lobos: 1944

 

In the "heavens" a sword of galaxies burns

Against the hunter's thigh: Orion, that "most tall and

beautiful of men," strides out, a lion's skin on

His shoulders, the star that tips his spear

brilliant lilac and ashy.

His dog is at his heel.  He has left a woman.

He is going to find a treasure and

Steps off into space -- and falls forever --

Westward across the Pacific; the sword burning,

The speartip brilliant lilac and ashy.

Standing at the edge of the sea,

standing here you would look up and say "Oh, what poetry this

is! What sky-blessed story:"

For this is the poem, the story; the hunter -- never mind his

name -- Orion, Ulysses, Hercules, his eye on the treasure,

the journey always beginning.

"A journey to find treasure?"

"Oh, the treasure is the journey."

"Orion wanted what?"

"I disremember. But…"

"What?"

"Ulysses only wanted to get home."

"A good story."

I think this story the best our civilization has.

Think of the 600 million dead required to create it.

Let's say Homer started it, though

surely it was another peeled Ape of infinite faculties, clubbed

to death somewhere in the steppes of Russia. Let's begin

with Homer.  Four million years to make large animals, perhaps

one million years of various modulations of torment to make a Homer.

After the war

They say, his inward eye contracted, he made a poem to draw

The starlight from the thighs of the water.  A poem about a rest-

less man. A poem about a liquidation.

Is this a story to

Tell a woman;

A story of killed and killing things, of the gods who

Kill yet live forever? Is this even like nobility?

And… this is the best we have.

I mean this: we will not look at the unhuman heaven.

We live in slave camps and therefore must have our Homer

To sing that the restless man will live forever

As a god.

Perhaps only Jenghiz could tell the truth.

But even he would have his Homer to draw

The starlight from the water

So that

Something human will live forever in the clear dark.

O vile enskyement!

And Homer was the best of the liars

Who made a compact with Death.

What if we saw the actual stars?  What

if, for one instant, we could leave behind the vulgarity of our

consciousness and see the unhuman beauty of reality?

But we sicken on what is not even half-real.

Greek civilization goes under.

Another death in the family.

Rome degrades itself. A tortured lip twitches.

"Give me the hammer."  Fire dives from the high

air.

A tortured god is not the prettiest of stories.  Leave it to the

poets.

"Look at the stars.  Orion wants it,

Perseus wants it, even the star-eyed

dog wants it.

But they can't have it --

having been born before Christ flipped a nickel."

Only love can open the sky.  There is a

flower in the heart

of the star.

The treasure is the

flower.

We have seen it.

It loves you."

Dante's rose.

What extravagant kindness!

I think that you will find more kindness

in the claws of a lion.

Another thousand years of self-

Importance.  The crystal in the granite is a fire wheel.

The Calla Lily is a fire wheel.

Another war and,

in complete candor and acutely aware of the writer's freedom

the public poets thrust Goebbels and Roosevelt

into the sky.

Other poets

(Secure in the goat pasture and looking at the stars)

Speak of art, of religion, of the never-ending story

Of the pure world.  Where?

Above

the torture camp?

"You need this," they say.  "After the bombings, after

the battle squalor you will need this also."  They say, "This is

beauty.

This is love."

It passeth understanding.

They say -- the best of them say --

Homer, Dante, Shakespeare say, men at the

extremest limit say,

That this, this hungered emptiness, is beauty.

Therefore:

Civilizations are built on the bones of sleepy children

and this winter, under the Pleiades, there die large numbers.

It is only a trick of deep gravity

that makes the hunter fall westward and graveward to Asia.

All day I listen to the radio.

At night I turn to the nameless stars.

Orion is falling into Asia.

Nothing is falling into Asia.

When will we ever be clean?

Fire.