On Goya's "Saturn"

That god who stares from the picture-space

As if he-only now it's done,

The madness slaked-can recognize the face

Whose blood and brains he gulped, to be his son,

Catches the humanist's eye.

Chronus, blind time, knowing himself again

To be Kronos the wretched King,

Squirms like a frog across the void. His pain

Goya suggests in the stiff dance he's doing;

The darker shape of why

Is shadowed in the history of Spain.

The deed of sacrifice once done

Is such as never can be done again.

The naked body of the beloved son

In his sire's hand must die.

And many kingdoms of the past have died

Choked by the monuments they raised:

Eternity bought by infanticide,

An immortality of being praised.

The fierce Spanish sky

Towers like fate over exhausted fields;

The gold they wrestled from the sun

Wasted the factories and burnt the guilds.

All that the dark conquistadors had won

Time swiftly would deny.

The traveller, though, is not content at last.

There is an immortality

That looks, not to the future, but the past.

His own exacted, but willed, piety

Gives history the lie.

We can be deathless backwards, then, says he.

And now he shivers, for he knows

Across the waste of every century

The high and fiery fellowship of those

Carved in lapis-lazuli.

There are three kinds of immortality.

Electromagnetism's one:

It neither lives nor dies. The family tree

Makes two: my seed's my father and my son.

The last is memory.

He calls to mind a fable he once read:

There'd been a thermonuclear war,

And Greece, by good luck, among all the dead,

Had not been scathed. Two scholars hear the roar

From the grove at Delphi.

After the grief, the known loss of sons, wives-

Scorched basements, as they come to know,

All that is left of their American lives,

New-vacant wavelengths on the radio-

They find that they must die,

Only more slowly than the world they mourn.

Although the heaven is blue, and Greece

Seems to lie glowing in the sea new-born,

The sickness that's too pure to call disease

Beams from the perfect sky.

And so they haste in their last weeks to see

Parnassos and Mount Helicon,

The pleasant vales of pastoral Thessaly,

And last, Olympus, shining in the sun.

They now begin to die.

But through that perfect summer, goatsmilk cheese

And moussaka and Samian wine

And olives, resin-all the grace of Greece-

In dialectic's helical design

They slowly learn to fly:

The riddle is that Oedipus's quest

Leads to the breaking of the atom;

The analytic wisdom of the West

Stems from one trivial desideratum:

Asking the question, Why?

And in the company of Socrates,

More and more plainly real and strange,

They learn to little reck the world's decease.

The ideal forms survive the death of change.

They are in ecstasy.

At last-the story goes-no marrying

Now, nor giving in marriage, so

We see the stronger comrade carrying

His friend, embracing him, as lovers do; the glow

Of a Greek evening sky.

The traveller remains unsatisfied.

The fable in his memory

Cannot shake off its loneliness and pride.

Men make a kind of immortality

Without a woman by,

But like the boy-soldiers who know how to die

And have not learnt a way to live

With their slight sacrifice they'll dignify

A vulgar ideology with what they give.

The traveller is I.

All of a sudden I am thirty-five.

The layered myth of babyhood

Is further than the last hours I shall live.

The absence of myself, not understood

Till now, comes with a sigh.

I must escape. How? Clothe myself with laws

Till their stiff raiment, of its own,

Stands when the flesh is spent? and lock the doors

Of change, a holy figure carved in stone?

That was Kant's lullaby.

Or plunge into the Heraclitan fire

Joining the immortality of change?

Or in the tragic mask, upon a pyre

Take to myself my fate? Is it not strange

How the I clings to I?

I know a man, the wisest of his time,

Who when I asked him which he'd choose

. Between loved persons and a deathless rhyme,

Answered 'the poem.' To leave a name, he'd lose

Wife, children, family.

And that's his weakness, though I honor him.

The little lacking of the man

Like the untimely withering of a limb

Pays for the flight of the Olympian.

It's a great gift, to die.

All we can do is pour the spirit on the ground.

The traveller, the humanist,

Has held his sick baby in his arms, and found

The mystery that metaphysics missed:

No heaven in the sky,

But the sheer toil of living as a wife,

Banal repeated sacrifice,

The long humiliation of a life

Known intimately by another's eyes,

The fruitless hushabye;

The need to judge, when all is relative,

And not to need too much, unless

Your lover, heartsick, has a need to give-

But then the shining in the baby's face,

And dawning in his eye.

The world's life does not grow along a line.

The future of the settled past

Dies with the past itself. We redefine

By love the very laws of time, recast

The pattern of the sky.

The sages, we, and those who left no name

Share in the human Word divine.

And burning in the freshness of the flame

Like water turned by toil and love to wine,

We learn at last to die.