Orders Passages 24

For the Good,

il ben dell' intelletto, the good of the people,

the soul's good.

I put aside

whatever I once served of the poet, master

of enchanting words and magics,

not to disown the old mysteries, sweet

muthos our mouth's telling

and I will still tell the beads, in the fearsome

street I see glimpses of, I will pray again

to those great columns of moon's light-

Mothering Angels, hold my sight steady

and I will look this time as you bid me to see

the dirty papers, monies, laws, orders

and corpses of people and people-shit.

From house to house the armd men go,

in Santo Domingo hired and conscripted killers

against the power of an idea, against

Gassire's lute, the song

of Wagadu, household of the folk,

commune of communes

hidden seed in the hearts of men

and in each woman's womb hidden.

They do not know where it is, at Béziers

the Abbé of Citeaux orders: "Kill them all;

the Lord will know His own."

The pillars I saw in my dream last year, stand

in my heart and hold the blood,

my pulse rises and beats against its walls.

In the streets of Santo Domingo Herod's hosts again

to exterminate the soul of the people go

leaving behind them the dirty papers,

torn books and bodies-

Down this dark corridor-''this passage", the poet reminds me,

and now that Eliot is dead, Williams and H.D. dead,

Ezra alone of my old masters alive, let me

acknowledge Eliot was one of us, I was

one of his, whose "History has many

cunning passages, contrived corridors"

comes into the chrestomathy.

I thot to come into an open room

where in the south light of afternoon

one I was improvised

passages of changing dark and light,

a music dream and passion would have playd

to illustrate concords of order in order,

a contrapuntal communion of all things

-but Schubert is gone,

the genius of his melody

has passt, and all the lovely marrd sentiment

disownd I thot to come to. A poetry

having so much of beauty

that in those progressions rage,

grief, dismay pass into . . . But these are

chords of the beauty itself. The blood

streams from the bodies of his sons

to feed the voice of Gassire's lute;

the men who mean good

must rage, grieve, turn with dismay

to see how "base and unjust actions, when they are the

objects of hope, are lovely to those that vehemently

admire them"

and how far men following self-interest can betray all

good of self. There is no

good a man has in his own

things but in the community of every thing;

no nature he has

but his nature hidden in the heart of the living,

in the great household.

The cosmos will not

dissolve its orders at man's evil.

"That which is corrupted is corrupted with reference to

itself but not destroyd with reference to the universe;

for it is either air or water"

Chemistry having its equations

beyond our range of inequation.

There must be a power of an ambiguous nature

and a dominion given to choice: "For the

electing soul alone is transferrd

to another and another order . . ."