A wrench, a rift – that’s all one can foresee.Maybe one finds le grand néant; maybeAgain one spirals from the tuber’s eye.
620 As you remarked the last time we went byThe Institute: “I really could not tellThe difference between this place and Hell.”
We heard cremationists guffaw and snortAt Grabermann’s denouncing the RetortAs detrimental to the birth of wraiths.We all avoided criticizing faiths.The great Starover Blue reviewed the rolePlanets had played as landfalls of the soul.The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese630 Discanted on the etiquette at teasWith ancestors, and how far up to go.I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,And dealt with childhood memories of strangeNacreous gleams beyond the adults’ range.Among our auditors were a young priestAnd an old Communist. Iph could at leastCompete with churches and the party line.
In later years it started to decline:Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in640 Pale jellies and a floating mandolin.Fra Karamazov, mumbling his ineptAll 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 surveyOf death’s abyss. And when we lost our childI knew there would be nothing: no self-styledSpirit would touch a keyboard of dry wood650 To rap out her pet name; no phantom wouldRise gracefully to welcome you and meIn 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 wildMarch 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 fastDid life, the woolly caterpillar run.We went to Italy. Sprawled in the sunOn a white beach with other pink or brown670 Americans. Flew back to our small town.Found that my bunch of essay The UntamedSeahorse was “universally acclaimed”(It sold three hundred copies in one year).Again school started, and on hillsides, whereWound distant roads, one saw the steady streamOf carlights all returning to the dreamOf college education. You went onTranslating into French Marvell and Donne.It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane680 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 discussWhy Poetry Is Meaningful To Us.I gave my sermon, a full thing but short.As I was leaving in some haste, to thwartThe so-called “question period” at the end,One of those peevish people who attendSuch talks only to say they disagree690 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 chanceA doctor in the front row. At his feetPatly I fell. My heart had stopped to beat,It seems, and several moments passed beforeIt heaved and went on trudging to a moreConclusive destination. Give me nowYour full attention. Your full attention. I can’t tell you howI knew – but I did know that I had crossed700 The border. Everything I loved was lostBut no aorta could report regret.A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;And blood-black nothingness began to spinA system of cells interlinked withinCells interlinked within cells interlinkedWithin one stem. And dreadfully distinctAgainst the dark, a tall white fountain played.I realized, of course, that it was madeNot of our atoms; that the sense behind710 The scene was not our sense. In life, the mindOf any man is quick to recognizeNatural shams, and then before his eyesThe reed becomes a bird, the knobby twigAn inchworm, and the cobra head, a bigWickedly folded moth. But in the caseOf my white fountain what it did replacePerceptually was something that, I felt,Could be grasped only by whoever dweltIn 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 stateHe found me in “one could hallucinateOr dream in any sense. Later, perhaps,But not during the actual collapse.No, Mr. Shade.”No, Mr. Shade.”“But, Doctor, I was dead!”He smiled. “Not quite: just half a shade,” he said.
However, I demurred. In mind I kept730 Replaying the whole thing. Again I steppedDown from the platform, and felt strange and hot,And saw the chap stand up, and toppled, notBecause a heckler pointed with his pipe,But probably because the time was ripeFor just that bump and wobble on the partOf a limp blimp, an old unstable heart.
My vision reeked with truth. It had the tone,The quiddity and quaintness of its ownReality. It was. As time went on.740 Its constant vertical in triumph shone.Often when troubled by the outer glareOf street and strife, inward I’d turn, and there,There in the background of my soul it stood,Old Faithful! And its presence always wouldConsole me wonderfully. Then, one day,I came across what seemed a twin display.
It was a story in a magazineAbout a Mrs. Z. whose heart had beenRubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon’s hand.750 She told her interviewer of “The LandBeyond the Veil” and the account containedA hint of angels, and a glint of stainedWindows, and some soft music, and a choiceOf hymnal items, and her mother’s voice;But at the end she mentioned a remoteLandscape, a hazy orchard – and I quote:“Beyond that orchard through a kind of smokeI glimpsed a tall white fountain – and awoke.”
If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt760 Sees a new animal and captures it,And if, a little later, Captain SmithBrings back a skin, that island is no myth.Our fountain was a signpost and a markObjectively 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 JimForthwith I wrote. Got her address from him.Drove west three hundred miles to talk to her.770 Arrived. Was met by an impassioned purr.Saw that blue hair, those freckled hands, that raptOrchideous air – and knew that I was trapped.