“
Now reading
A.W.O.L.
EVE MERRIAM
Harmonically mated, honestly happy with husband,
yet lie
undersheet-shuddering for primeval jungle lover;
buy
ticket for trip and whole traveling-wish is to hurry back;
piano is playing sunny jazz, the room is filled with friends,
why
do you suddenly look lost and island-lonely?
O Lord-high
above all great and public grief squats private discontent.
AW.O.L,
When justice, not sweet charity, confers on all,
few will become Mozart, Chaucer, or Saint Paul;
still there will be the simple general good
and I can leave off writing poster-crude.
Far away from loud firing line of crisis,
happy in hush-circling hypotheses:
If you are not in the forest; does the tree truly fall?
Is it the slum or the drunken father causes the criminal?
did Nietzsche predict Hitler or comic-strip Superman's course?
Why do we never dream in technicolor;
when you reread the classics, do they always seem duller?
Was Einstein right about a fourth dimension,
or is all time another man-made invention?
Though you can swear it's the first you've seen that door,
that maddening feeling "I have been here before . . ."
How the personal past fades into history,
all one recalls of that Everest mystery
is the crying Mama doll, the childish sailor suit,
the trip to the beach, the cracker-jack loot.
Are we really intended to love only one;
; was it hen or egg first in the chicken-run?
Absent Without Leave. Conscience reminds me
back to black and white, to billboard-crude;
to the midget plans for the major good
and the moment's monster immediacy.