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That year, too, was finished.
Yellow fog vanished
in the lane of spring mistletoe,
Byron’s Pool, Newton’s rooms.
Emphatically, emphatically she said no
the second from the last time.
Her hair was light, bright red and beautiful.
She cried, I said don’t.
While, drugged, I increased
to a very high power,
several billion dollars of bombs
dropped on Cambodia, Jerolds,
on Jesus Green, declared
he intended to be great.
R. A. H. Prince, at High Table,
observed Lewis’ subtle depiction
of Eliot’s eyes in the famous portrait
that hung in Hall, insisted
every American owned a car.
Stop me if I’ve told you about
the treatise on evil in the University Library,
purple rhododendrons
burst apart in midnight sun,
Paris, Thonon-les-Bains, Geneva in April,
my sensitivity, and my luck.
Home in November after my second Michaelmas
to find — myself. Myself
an abstraction; myself
drives to see the great factories,
wills his desire not to accumulate
in the brain, remembers
the Angelus’ cadences
on the Shrine of the Little Flower’s chimes.
Have I told you about
the Pillar of Families and the Hope
of the Sick, instants
of awareness, my own words
I should not comprehend?
July, in the village Ajaltoun
in the mountain in Lebanon
on the feast of Saint Elias,
while Beirut’s heavy moon
and tin and cardboard houses
revolved behind my eyes,
I danced one step forward
and, then, one step to the side,
knelt, rose straightbacked,
upright in the beginnings
of some strange knowledge
I thought was true.
I vowed discipline. I vowed love.
I read all the books, believed
my irony my nostalgia reversed —
I believed it. January
in Cambridge, a new year,
I waken at dawn to walk
to the old Gasworks outside the city
toward familiar smells.
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