TIBERIUS AT CAPRI
Old as the hanging avalanche of stone
Where the shuddering hammer splits the lime-white walls,
And fine-grained as a column's vine-grown crown
Or fluting delicate as fishes' gills,
His mind must have seemed sometimes; and the gulls
Wheeling the colonnade, circling to snare
A theorem of gods in depthless air.
The beggared sea crawled to the island's foot
And pattered on the shingled rocks, the shell
Sloping like rooftiles into dark blue, caught
In the water's coiling, pale as olive oil,
Rippled like wave-peaks painted on a bowl,
Bouncing Odysseus' toy ships, returning
To the ripples of the artist's taut designing.
The sea's blue bowl was fettered to his lap
By linked designs of legions, whose spilt blood
Had knit the wounds disfiguring the map.
And now, sustaining with a spider's thread
Of mind a hardening motion, he was gnawed
By lingering thoughts the sea and sky leached at.
A spider's prey, he felt his mind sucked out.
The world's intelligence crushed to a point,
Reckless, that he had lived his passions down,
Held any object his whim might appoint
Locked as a lover with his mind, all drawn
To that one ticklish point, the thinnest line
Between them, taut as the horizon when
The blue sky pressed on the sea's bluer skin.
His power of action on recalcitrant
Unformed matter and man's stubborn humor
Gave his old age another thing to want:
An atom driven from the daimon's hammer,
A spark declining from its ancient summer,
Like its maker, compelled, it makes and makes,
Hurtling forever through the same mistakes.
As one whose love produced deformities,
At last it seemed his every action was
Two-faced as Odysseus' unsounded seas,
As deep as policy dyed with the lies
Of everyone he loved. The last device,
His own beloved's bloody Orphic fall,
Was the most unfathomed Siren pool of all.
To escape the hammer's stroke seemed to demand
He must deny the power whose eloquence
Was all the earth could offer god or man.
Where could he turn when the last wave of sense
Washed over unrefreshing, and the dense
Word failed to rise and penetrate the air
And lay the indifferent soul of the world bare?