Apples from Shinar. Hyam Plutzik
and radiance;
As the locust tree is changed by the wind Time;
As the wind Time too will lapse, will blow from another quarter—
Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.
IF CAUSALITY IS IMPOSSIBLE, GENESIS IS RECURRENT
The abrupt appearance of a yellow flower
Out of the perfect nothing, is miraculous.
The sum of Being, being discontinuous,
Must presuppose a God-out-of-the-box
Who makes a primal garden of each garden.
There is no change, but only re-creation
One step ahead. As in the cinema
Upon the screen, all motion is illusory.
So if your mind were keener and could clinch
More than its flitting beachhead in the Permanent,
You’d see a twinkling world flashing and dying
Projected out of a tireless, winking Eye
Opening and closing in immensity—
Creating, with Its look, beside all else
Always Adamic passion and innocence,
The bloodred apple or the yellow flower.
THE OLD WAR
No one cared for the iron sparrow
That fell from the sky that quiet day
With no bird’s voice, a mad beast’s bellow.
Sparrow, your wing was a broken scar
As you blundered into the mother-barley.
Sparrow, how many men did you bear?
“Ten good men, pilot and gunner—
Trapped in the whirlpool, held by no hands,
Twisting from truth with curse and prayer.
“Ten good men I bore in my belly—
Not as the mother-barley bears.
Ten good men I returned to her there.”
Thunder rolling over the barley!
Fire swarming high and higher!
Home again to the barley-mother—
Ten good sons, pilot and gunner,
Radioman and bombardier.
THE PREMONITION
Trying to imagine a poem of the future,
I saw a nameless jewel lying
Lurid on a table of black velvet.
Light winked there like eyes half-lidded,
Raying the dark with signals,
Lunar, mineral, maddening
As that white night-flower herself,
And with her delusive chastity.
Then one said: “I am the poet of the damned.
My eyes are seared with the darkness that you willed me.
This jewel is my heart, which I no longer need.”
JIM DESTERLAND
As I was fishing off Pondy Point
Between the tides, the sea so still—
Only a whisper against the boat—
No other sound but the scream of a gull,
I heard the voice you will never hear
Filling the crannies of the air.
The doors swung open, the little doors,
The door, the hatch within the brain,
And like the bellowing of ruin
The surf upon the thousand shores
Swept through me, and the thunder-noise
Of all the waves of all the seas.
The doors swung shut, the little doors,
The door, the hatch within the ear,
And I was fishing off Pondy Pier,
And all was as it was before,
With only the whisper of the swell
Against the boat, and the cry of a gull.
I draw a sight from tree to tree
Crossing this other from knoll to rock,
To mark the place. Into the sea
My line falls with an empty hook,
Yet fools the world. So day and night
I crouch upon the thwarts and wait.
There is a roaring in the skies
The great globes make, and there is the sound
Of all the atoms whirling round
That one can hear if one is wise—
Wiser than most—if one has heard
The doors, the little doors, swing wide.
AFTER LOOKING INTO A BOOK BELONGING TO MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, ELI ELIAKIM PLUTZIK
I am troubled by the blank fields, the speechless graves.
Since the names were carved upon wood, there is no word
For the thousand years that shaped this scribbling fist
And the eyes staring at strange places and times
Beyond the veldt dragging to Poland.
Lovers of words make simple peace with death,
At last demanding, to close the door to the cold,
Only Here lies someone.
Here lie no one and no one, your fathers and mothers.
THE GEESE
A miscellaneous screaming that comes from nowhere
Raises the eyes at last to the moonward-flying
Squadron of wild-geese arcing the spatial cold.
Beyond the hunter’s gun or the will’s range
They press southward, toward the secret marshes
Where the appointed gunmen mark the crossing
Of flight and moment. There is no force stronger
(In the sweep of the monomaniac passion, time)
Than the will toward destiny, which is death.
Value the intermediate splendor of birds.
THE MYTHOS OF SAMUEL HUNTSMAN
If I should round the corner quickly—
Or suddenly turn my head—
I know I’d catch them preparing the scene,
Painting a tree or hanging the moon,
Arranging houses and streets exactly
In the desperate game which is God’s.
For I have seen through their plausible