I keep high in my mind the cliff
That was my Everest when young
On whose face in boy-imagining
Between the earth and death I hung.
Whenever I return to where
Only funerals make me go,
I do not drive to where it stands
For fear it prove too low.
I fool my mind with my own past,
Exiled from childhood’s dreams,
Nor will I cease to swim across
The rivers I made of streams.
Locus Classicus
Think of the early humanists
Bent over in their privies
Reading the epics of Homer
Or some narrative of Livy’s.
Ignoring the cloacal smell
They preserved the classical mind
By letting their spirits soar above
That which they left behind.
Pity the students centuries down
Being force-fed Greek and Latin
Wishing the humanists had dropped
The texts in the place they sat in.
The Child is Father to the Man
“…’objective correlative’ which was,
I suppose was what they called a mask in St. Louis”
--Seamus Heaney, “Feeling Into Words”
It was the afternoon of All Hallows’ Eve,
And Mrs. Eliot was supervising
Her six-year old son’s selection
Of the costume he would wear that night.
To her suggestions of pirate, hobo, or cowboy
He said with a stamp of his foot. “None
Is objectively correlative, Mother,
And thus none is exactly right.”
The
Back in a rubber body bag
Blacker than his black skin
Came Calvin of the Corner Poolroom
And coke and grass and gin.
What to Calvin was Viet Nam,
Poor child of the city’s brick,
Who did not hear the sniper’s bolt
As it slid back with a snick?
Over his head the gunship choppers
Chopped out their deadly chuck,
But Death ran Calvin to the ground
Outside of Phan Van Vuc.
They laid him down in Arlington,
Gave his mother a folded flag.
His poolroom brothers sneered and scoffed—
Called it a honky rag.
For what, I wonder, did this lad die?
For what his early grave?
Poor Calvin. He did not even have
An English Queen to save.
I hope the chaplains are correct:
That undone is Adam’s Fall,
Since the sum of Calvin’s life seems now
Only letters on The Wall.
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