My Heart Is A

(After reading Delmore Schwartz's Genesis)

Lo, he has set the world in each man's heart.

From the book.

Between the Ego and the Id,

Between the Didn't and the Did,

Between the Will and Wish-I-could

Where twist the devious roots of Good;

Among the kissing rimes where blow

The flora of the Libido

There falls, more cruel than light of day,

The Psychoanalytic ray.

Should not the poet also tear

The snide integuments we wear,

And in the hash of slumber find

The proper study of mankind?

And all that he has given fame

Be called by quite another name?

To the babe that lay serene

In waters of prenatal green

Our birth is not, as has been stated

By a bard more elevated,

A sleep and a forgetting.

It can be damned upsetting.

The poet picking for his theme

The stitches in the psychic seam

Shall come to sex at three or four

And tantrums on the bathrom floor;

Not only angels long ago,

And tintinnabulating snow.

Unearths the tough traumatic root

Of him who bit his father's foot.

Who thinks he's Hamlet on the phone

That was the child that sulked alone.

You think you're Christ or Harold Lloyd!

Said the analyst who thinks he's Freud.

Sigmund Freud! no other name

Shall dim his antiseptic fame.

We find the questing artist much

Intrigued by Oedipus and such:

The Doctor sooner may repair

What ails you mon semblable, mon frère,

If now the learned poet choose

To woo the prophylactic Muse.

u

But he who picks the I apart

Shall find the Race's steady heart,

And seeing Man behind the men

May give us back the Soul again.

Incarnate single! Memory rife

With what a sea of human life;

What fathoms bear the racial wick

Lighting the brief lamps of the quick.

What dark immensities converge

Here where the dead sextillions merge;

More ghosts than I can reckon keep

Their watch in my disheveled sleep,

In whom I hear ancestral voices

Prophesying other Joyces.

Think I'm Hamlet? Am indeed!

Am Joseph bound, Orestes freed.

Am still Ulysses, sick for Thee,

Sailing still the wicked sea;

The sinner Nemesis constrains,

The fool Calypso still detains.

Wind, her hair is sweet and black,

Blow my soft Egyptian back ...

"Your Genesis is everywhere!"

Who swam the sea and flew the air.

A thousand years are in your sight

As waters running in the night...

Who sees the Man behind the men

Breathes the Soul back in again,

Keeping the immortal fame

Though he take his mortal name,

-Sing Icarus, where still he flies

To perish in the conquered skies-

Dreaming, till the human spirit

Shall be lost in Heaven, or near it.