Auden

How did it feel to have X-ray vision
into everyone's foibles, to understand
at a look how the closest friend
could betray you and never lose a night's sleep?
It must have been like Shakespeare's intuitions
about court intrigue. Somehow he knew
the masks each knowing one assumed
were transparent as he or she did the dirt
to some other soul. He knew so many ways
to excuse infidelity, his great theme,
or to fall short of fidelity, his great theme.
To be faithful — true — through every temptation
to be unfaithful, untrue, was his concern.
Reality said it was not possible.
Perhaps that made fidelity tragic.
He knew it all, and yet everything
he believed creeps out of his verse
like the moonax for the sun of faith,
in a moment of moss and stonecrop.

He was unhappy with the junk art
had turned to, and in his own face — that slab
of wrinkled limestone, that wedding cake
left out in the rain — held the rebuke
to our collapse. Today, would he be happier?
No, only more deeply incised with the effort
to revive the word-hoard of the OED.
The dissolving landscape of his body, more
complicated and less durable than limestone
with its vascular system of cleansing waters,
was always wearing away, with his help, of course.
But the colossal beams and cylinders
he quarried for temples and citadels,
fora and gazebos, crumble under
a different weathering — forgetfulness.
To be in an outward form of collapse
the steadfast lover, inwardly asking
the stars even as they receded from his gaze,
to let him love them, let him be
as faithful as they seemed to be:
and to insist on the difference between
truth and beauty, truth and love:
in the one case sticking with truth,
in the other loving despite the truth:
these were his difficult aspirations.

The great poets have always understood us
in our time, even those like Wordsworth
only interested in themselves. He understood
the anxiety our souls filter like limestone
and the caverns it fills with volutions
and involutions, spires and downward florescences
all of our own substance, undermined and erected
into self-portraits that alarm us with claustrophobia,
worried this is all there is, this cave
crowded with complexes and syndromes
like stalagmites and stalactites, and no way out,
where we lurk, afraid. It is here that he strikes a light
and shows us our kin must have done the same once,
leaving their record of fabulous creatures
in blood and charcoal on the walls.

He knew the Christ he worshiped existed
in his time as intimately and ignorantly
as any thinking person. Was it the man
or the god who thought the end was near,
and the only way to stockpile for disaster
was to draw into communities of love,
sharing fate like bread? Nobody lives
that way, or few do or can successfully,
and so he reminded us that two millennia
had failed to see the end as prophesied
by a charismatic young adept in Judea.
It was the cultural inheritance as much
as the urgency of apocalypse he cherished
and urged to go forward, its language and its import —
in the face of change. He was conservative
with a radical's root insight, that among
the available myths, this was the story
that made sense if sense was to be made.
And as for nonsense, which he loved,
it was the nihilist's gobbledygook,
to be circumscribed and held in check
as the charming misrule of limericks
and nursery rhymes and camp humor.

Would that he were here to tell us how
to judge among shades of terror —
or are they hues and outcries?
The cautioner who smirks as he alerts us
would have earned his cold eye
as he should earn ours. But there is no one
who can articulate the end of history
as ultimate redemption, and do it as if
he were singing a simple hymn in church.
Evangelists of doom wear unctuous smiles.
He knew a way to think our life through
and believed the blessing of order and structure
brought out the best in what had been in us
created to be good. Evil loves
chaos always, agitprop and slogans,
all the trite forms of disinformation.
Good is always like starlight and sunlight,
and poetry when it means just what it says,
and yet admits the moon's ambiguities
and would not be the same without them.
What would he tell us out of his generous
intelligence, which had blended utopia
with Eden, the social and the salvational?
The time, our time, must be refreshed
by salvage and retrieval, old ways of being new,
like those lights in the sky, strange and familiar
as a season's changes — about which every year
we know a little more, still expecting
winter's nakedness, spring's green film,
the balm of summer, and the start of all
these things in another fall.

Mark Jarman
The Georgia Review
Special Focus: Creatures
Volume LIX, Number 3
Fall 2005

Copyright © 2005 by the University of Georgia.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

REMEMBER TO SUPPORT POETRY DAILY'S GENEROUS SPONSORS... Sponsor PD!