Runes

FOUNDED IN I9I2 BY HARRIET MONROE

VOLUME XCIII NUMBER §

FEBRUARY 1959

HOWARD NEMEROV

RUNES

. . . insaniebam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter.

ST. AUGUSTINE

I

This is about the stillness in moving things,

In running water, also in the sleep

Of winter seeds, where time to come has tensed

Itself, enciphering a script so fine

Only the hourglass can magnify it, only

The years unfold its sentence from the root.

I have considered such things often, but

I cannot say I have thought deeply of them:

That is my theme, of thought and the defeat

Of thought before its object, where it turns

As from a mirror, and returns to be

The thought of something and the thought of thought,

A trader doubly burdened, commercing

Out of one stillness and into another.

POBTRY

u

About Ulysses, the learned have reached two

Distinct conclusions. In one, he secretly

Returns to Ithaca, is recognized

By Euryclea, destroys the insolent suitors,

And makes himself known to Penelope,

Describing the bed he built; then, at the last

Dissolve, we see him with Telemachus

Leaving the palace, planning to steal sheep:

The country squire resumes a normal life.

But in the other, out beyond the gates

Of Hercules, gabbling persuasively

About virtue and knowledge, he sails south

To disappear from sight behind the sun;

Drowning near blessed shores he flames in hell.

I do not know which ending is the right one.

m

Sunflowers, traders rounding the horn of time

Into deep afternoons, sleepy with gain,

The fall of silence has begun to storm

Around you where you nod your heavy heads

Whose bare poles, raking out of true, will crack,

Driving your wreckage on the world's lee shore.

Your faces no more will follow the sun,

But bow down to the ground with a heavy truth

That dereliction learns, how charity

Is strangled out of selfishness at last;

When, golden misers in the courts of summer,

You are stripped of gain for coining images

And broken on this quarter of the wheel,

It is on savage ground you spill yourselves,

And spend the tarnished silver of your change.

IV

The seed sleeps in the furnaces of death,

A cock's egg slept till hatching by a serpent

Wound in his wintry coil, a spring so tight

In his radical presence that every tense

Is now. Out of this head the terms of kind,

Distributed in syntax, come to judgment,

Are basilisks who write our sentences

Deep at the scripture's pith, in rooted tongues,

How one shall marry while another dies.

Give us our ignorance, the family tree

Grows upside down and shakes its heavy fruit,

Whose buried stones philosophers have sought.

For each stone bears the living word, each word

Will be made flesh, and all flesh fall to seed:

Such stones from the tree; and from the stones, such

blood.

v

The fat time of the year is also time

Of the Atonement; birds to the berry bushes,

Men to the harvest; a time to answer for

Both present plenty and emptiness to come.

When the slain legal deer is salted down,

When apples smell like goodness, cold in the cellar,

You hear the ram's horn sounded in the high

Mount of the Lord, and you lift up your eyes

As though by this observance you might hide

The dry husk of an eaten heart which brings

Nothing to offer up, no sacrifice

Acceptable but the canceled-out desires

And satisfactions of another year's

Abscess, whose zero in His winter's mercy

Still hides the undecipherable seed.

vi

White water now in the snowflake's prison,

A mad king in a skullcap thinks these thoughts

In regular hexagons, each one unlike

Each of the others. The atoms of memory,

Like those that Democritus knew, have hooks

At either end, but these? Insane tycoon,

j These are the riches of order snowed without end

In this distracted globe, where is no state

To fingerprint the flakes or number these

Moments melting in flight, seeds mirroring

Substance without position or a speed

And course unsubstanced. What may the spring be,

Deep in the atom, among galactic snows,

But the substance of things hoped for, argument

Of things unseen? White water, fall and fall.

vo

Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel

-Said to the firstborn, the dignity and strength,

And the defiler of his father's bed.

Fit motto for a dehydrated age

Nervously watering whisky and stock,

Quick-freezing dreams into realities.

Brain-surgeons have produced the proustian syndrome,

But patients dunk their tasteless madeleines

In vain, those papers that the Japanese

Amused themselves by watering until

They flowered and became Combray, flower

No more. The plastic and cosmetic arts

Unbreakably record the last word and

The least word, till sometimes even the Muse,

In her transparent raincoat, resembles a condom.

vu

To go low, to be as nothing, to die,

To sleep in the dark water threading through

The fields of ice, the soapy, frothing water

That slithers under the culvert below the road,

Water of dirt, water of death, dark water,

And through the tangle of the sleeping roots

Under the coppery cold beech woods, the green

Pinewoods, and past the buried hulls of things

To come, and humbly through the breathing dreams

Of all small creatures sleeping in the earth;

To fall with the weight of things down on the one

Still ebbing stream, to go on to the end

With the convict hunted through the swamp all night,

The dog's corpse in the ditch, to come at last

Into the pit where zero's eye is closed.

Ix

In this dehydrated time of digests, pills

And condensations, the most expensive presents

Are thought to come in the smallest packages:

In atoms, for example. There are still

To be found, at carnivals, men who engrave

The Lord's Prayer on a grain of wheat for pennies,

But they are a dying race, unlike the men

Now fortunate, who bottle holy water

In plastic tears, and bury mustard seeds

In lucite lockets, and for safety sell

To be planted on the dashboard of your car

The statues, in durable celluloid,

Of Mary and St. Christopher, who both

With humble power in the world's floodwaters

Carried their heavy Savior and their Lord.

x

White water, white water, feather of a form

Between the stones, is the race run to stay

Or pass away? Your utterance is riddled,

Rainbowed and clear and cold, tasting of stone,

Its brilliance blinds me. But still I have seen,

White water, at the breaking of the ice,

When the high places render up the new

Children of water and their tumbling light

Laughter runs down the hills, and the small fist

Of the seed unclenches in the day's dazzle,

How happiness is helpless before your fall,

White water, and history is no more than

The shadows thrown by clouds on mountainsides,

A distant chill, when all is brought to pass

By rain and birth and rising of the dead.

x

A holy man said to me, "Split the stick

And there is Jesus." When I split the stick

To the dark marrow and the splintery grain

I saw nothing that was not wood, nothing

That was not God, and I began to dream

How from the tree that stood between the rivers

Came Aaron's rod that crawled in front of Pharaoh,

And came the rod of Jesse flowering

In all the generations of the Kings,

And came the timbers of the second tree,

The sticks and yardarms of the holy three-

masted vessel whereon the Son of Man

Hung between thieves, and came the crown of thorns,

The lance and ladder, when was shed that blood

Streamed in the grain of Adam's tainted seed.

xu

Consider how the seed lost by a bird

Will harbor in its branches most remote

Descendants of the bird; while everywhere

And unobserved, the soft green stalks and tubes

Of water are hardening into wood, whose hide,

Gnarled, knotted, flowing, and its hidden grain,

Remember how the water is streaming still.

Now does the seed asleep, as in a dream

Where time is compacted under pressures of

Another order, crack open like stone

From whose division pours a stream, between

The raindrop and the sea, running in one

Direction, down, and gathering in its course

That bitter salt which spices us the food

We sweat for, and the blood and tears we shed.

xm

There sailed out on the river, Conrad saw,

The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths,

The germs of Empire. To the ends of the earth

One many-veined bloodstream swayed the hulls

Of darkness gone, of darkness still to come,

And sent its tendrils steeping through the roots

Of wasted continents. That echoing pulse

Carried the ground swell of all sea-returns

Muttering under history, and its taste,

Saline and cold, was as a mirror of

The taste of human blood. The sailor leaned

To lick the mirror clean, the somber and

Immense mirror that Conrad saw, and saw

The other self, the sacred Cain of blood

Who would seed a commonwealth in the Land of Nod.

XIV

There is a threshold, that meniscus where

The strider walks on drowning waters, or

That tense, curved membrane of the camera's lens

Which darkness holds against the battering light

And the distracted drumming of the world's

Importunate plenty.- Now that threshold,

The water of the eye where the world walks

Delicately, is as a needle threaded

From the reel of a raveling stream, to stitch

Dissolving figures in a watered cloth,

A damask either-sided as the shroud

Of the lord of Ithaca, labored at in light,

Destroyed in darkness, while the spidery oars

Carry his keel across deep mysteries

To harbor in unfathomable mercies.

xv

To watch water, to watch running water,

Is to know a secret, seeing the twisted rope

Of runnels on the hillside, the small freshets

Leaping and limping down the tilted field

In April's light, the green, grave and opaque

Swirl in the millpond where the current slides

To be combed and carded silver at the fall;

It is a secret. Or it is not to know

The secret, but to have it in your keeping,

A locked box, Bluebeard's room, the deathless thing

Which it is death to open. Knowing the secret,

Keeping the secret-herringbones of light

Ebbing on beaches, the huge artillery

Of tides-it is not knowing, it is not keeping,

But being the secret hidden from yourself.