The Accountable

VOL. LXI NO. V

FEBRUARY 1943

SIX POEMS

THE ACCOUNTABLE

I WENT into the booth of time

To vote the reason against the rhyme,

And pulled the curtain at my back

Its snakes of motion hanging slack;

The symbols squirmed on the machine,

I saw the names and numerals preen

And fate was waiting reverent

Upon its sole constituent

When a voice said over the telephone

As coarse as grinding gears its tone,

"Are you prepared, mayhem, mayhap,

To take the rap, the basic rap?"

I passed inside a window's shop,

The land of living at the top;

Curtains of marble, gold and ice

Rehearsed a sample paradise;

The lights were bright with lack of air,

The mannequins' breasts all hard and bare,

The decorations rose like hymns

Praising the silks on fashion's limbs;

Their teeth against a storm of nights

The mirrors laughed in darks and lights;

Outside I saw the people mass

A wall of eyes against the glass,

When a voice came flowing over the phone,

A stream of rocks on a bed of stone,

"It's cash, it's credit, it's a trap,

Are you prepared to take the rap?"

I found myself at a jury's box

Whose panels pictured scales and clocks;

A window hung upon the wall

In which the sun was standing tall;

One eye of justice, bandage off,

The hub of swimming spokes of love,

Looked in and at three stories' height

Parted the drapes of inner light.

I sat before twelve men whose ears

Were pinned against their hearts by fears;

The judge who filled the niche of tense,

A very rock of recompense,

Lifted his statue's face of law

OSCAR WILEIAMS

Above the prisoner doomed with awe,

When the court's tension like a glass broke,

As the hard voice on the telephone spoke,

"I cannot listen to such pap,

Are you prepared to take the rap?"

Then I ran to a telephone booth

To get at the number of the truth;

A bulb was burning on the air

Bald and bleary and debonair;

I rifled a thousand pages to look,

A million names were in the book;

I saw that they were all the same,

A million printings of one name;

Pillars of numbers held my eyes

Among the zeros of surmise;

I spun the number on the wheel

The combinations of the real;

The rubber mouthpiece black and foul

Stood open at a dreadful vowel,

The dial raced around and back,

A zipper slithered down time's track;

The telephone booth began to rock

With a canoe's motion at a dock;

The bulb blazed forth, it had begun

Drawing directly on the sun;

The booth, I saw, was the jury's box

Empty of juries, judges, clocks;

That window's shop, a pack of lies,

Was telescoped to a coffin's size;

The booth, I saw, was the voting place

Everything gone except the space,

Everything gone except the mouth

In which there ground the gears of wrath,

And O it came over the telephone,

The voice that gnawed me to my bone, ;

"Answer the question and no claptrap,

Are you prepared to take the rap,

The basic rap, the basic rap?"