BEACON STATION
The buckled platform and the ancient bench
Whose splinters had gone furry with old age
At Beacon Station waited for the spring
Like a decrepit gentleman. And I
Once spent some cold odd hours there shivering
In certain speculation on the sun.
Although I knew not even that would last
Forever, it at least served the time being
And took the chill out of the morning air
And the icy light spurting in fountains from
The sky behind the town, behind my back
And the blue-gray houses stacked along the hill.
My brain ached for the webs of the brown gulls,
Specks bobbing, sticks or chips out on the river.
A foam of dirty snow, pocked with the soot
And honeycombed, crust brittle with the melt,
Lay on the river's edge and by the tracks.
One green vine used to grow out of the jaws
Of that ramshackle elevator-house
With its faint dead smell, and its broken windows
That gaped out on the platform like a skull
In some old manuscript, its mouth uncurling
A delicate scroll that grates 'Memento mori.'
That was not more than two springs, gone, now. But
The time seems longer, counting deaths of friends
Taken by violence, taken by surprise.
The river is the paragon of changes--
The river is the region's history.
It slides in purple like a changing silk
Hung out with Newburgh's lights in autumn; or
Dead piles of splintered ice that heave and crack,
Flawed pearl, brown, lustrous as belly-scales,
Rise and drop on the sluggish inland tide.
And then in summer when the new sun draws
The smoke up from the water like a veil,
The air all fills to bursting with white light
Until the blaze has melted all the mist,
And sun lies on the mountains like a shawl.
Stability is not an attribute
Of things. Eternity of tidal rivers
Springs like a fountain from the roots of mind.
I think the dead are almost paradigms:
They have betrayed me constantly, because
They live with me past all change, to deny
No one is ever just as I remember.
The world shouts and cries out to be renewed
Forever, and I hear it and am it.
There is a paradox in Hamlet's nut.
The nutshell's counted infinite inside,
As solid as the primum mobile,
As far away, also as comforting,
An ample space for anybody's kinging,
Where the itch to measure all that sky with mind
Explains flea-bitten Arabs on their backs,
Charting numb rovings of the Bear, explains
Why number-plagued Pythagoras invented
The tunes of spheres; or packs all history
Into the various nutshells where it rattles.
(I saw a volume once upon a shelf,
Entitled, with Teutonic modesty,
Das ganze Aesthetik in einem Nuss.)
But if the kernel once should crack the shell,
No packing of the head with brain suffices
To make worlds more substantial than a toy.
The clever king who cracked the Sphinx's nut
Found to his sorrow just himself inside,
And a great deal of tragedy befell,
And history became inscrutable.
In summer when the river glinted, and
Some ragged clouds played tag like Wordsworth's lambs,
I dozed off, lying stunned in the soft sun
One day at Beacon, waiting for the train.
I watched myself enter a dozing body
Dreaming Wordsworth's dream of the stone and shell
And the Arab who was also Don Quixote,
Fleeing the inundation just to save
A book of Euclid--that was the stone--and
The voice of poetry prisoned in the shell.
One cloud covered the sun. The sudden chill
Jolted me half awake. The atmosphere
Before so clear and warm seemed all at once
To whiten like wax hardening. I saw
A fantastic old Quixote by the tracks
With a sack and stick, stirring among the cinders;
And merging with that apparition seemed
To see Wordsworth's leech-gatherer on the moor,
Stirring the lonely puddles with his staff,
More denizen than visitor of the moor,
Incapable of irony toward the world.
I asked him, powerless not to, what he did.
He said his purpose was to find the clinkers
Whose shapes were interesting, among the piles
Collected by the tracks. The random sculpting
Sometimes created nuggets he could call
The shapes of living things, of flowers, people,
Squirrels, Madonnas, peacocks, satyrs, death's-heads.
There is some mystery here. How is it men
Find beauty in landscapes where there's no land,
Find beauty in the valleys of the moon,
Inhabit bleakest places with the mind?
The moon-man in the legend was a thief,
Striding with staff and dog and burdened with
A sack of thorns that were his sins. It's worse
To learn to be a thief where nothing is,
Pursue even the slag with hounds of mind,
And leave not even used, useless, reduced
Matter in peace. And what's more sinful than
To haunt matter with self, to fix the self
And fix the matter at the deadest point?
The dead inhabit us most certainly,
Bone of our bone, dead marrow of our marrow,
After the times of great uncertainty,
After the times of great accomplishment.
We seem to be the shells that were ourselves,
The cast productions that we leave behind.
And yet we cannot be; we must have moved
To another place to look back at ourselves,
To have the power to see with clarity
What we have been, what we no longer are.