Life and Letters

An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city
Where here and there against the febrile sky
The shaft of an unbroken column rises,
And in the sands indifferent lizards keep
The shattered traces of old monuments.
Here where the death of the imagination
Trances the mind with shadow, here the shapes
Of tumbled arch and pediment stand out
In their last violence of illumination.

By day his valet rules him, forcing him
With milk and medicines, a deference
Cloaking the bully. “Signora X was here
During your nap; I told her doctor’s orders,
You must stay quiet and rest, keep up your strength.”
He leaves the pasteboard rectangle, engraved,
Scrawled in regretful haste, and goes his way
To join a lounging crony belowstairs.
(“The old man’s not so wide awake today.”)

The ivory body in the dressing gown
(Not the silk robe the Countess sent; he spills
His milk sometimes, and that would be a pity)
Stirs in the sinking warmth that bathes his chair
And looks on summer sunlight in the square.
Below, the fat concierge points out his window
With half-drawn blinds, to tourists who inquire.
There are a few who make the pilgrimage;
They stand and gaze and go away again.
Something to say that one has stood beneath
His window, though they never see himself.
The post brings letters stamped in foreign countries.
He holds them in his fingers, turns them over.
“He always says he means to read them later,
But I should say his reading days are finished.
All he does now is watch the square below.
He seems content enough; and I’ve no trouble.
An easy life, to watch him to his grave.”

The letters still arrive from universities,
Occasionally a charitable cause,
A favor-seeker, or an aged friend.
But now it seems no answers are expected
From one whose correspondence is collected
In two large volumes, edited with notes.
What should that timid hand beneath its sleeve
Warmed by the rich Italian sun, indite
To vindicate its final quarter-decade?
No; he has written all that can be known.
If anything, too much; his greedy art
Left no domain unpillaged, grew its breadth
From fastening on every life he touched.
(Some went to law, some smiled, some never guessed.)
But now the art has left the man to rest.

The failing searchlight of his mind remains
To throw its wavering cone of recognition
Backward upon those teeming images.
New York invades the memory again:
A million jewels crowd the boyish brain
With apprehension of an unmastered world.
The red-haired girl waves from the Brooklyn ferry,
The bridges leap like fountains into noon.
Again the train goes rocking across-country
Past midnight platforms where the reddish light
Plays on a game of checkers through the window,
Till dawn spells snow on emptiness of plains.
Once more in San Francisco Margaret wakes
Beside him in the heat of August dark,
Still weeping from a nightmare.
So by day
He looks on summer sunlight in the square.

The grinning Bacchus trickles from his gourd
A thin bright spume of water in the basin,
While the hot tiles grow cool as evening drops
Deep cobalt from white buildings. Far in air
Buonarroti’s dome delays the gold.
The old man who has come to Rome to die
Ignores the death of still another day.
So many days have died and come to life
That time and place seem ordered by his valet;
He puts them on and off as he is told.

Now he is standing bareheaded in dusk
While fireworks rain into the sea at Biarritz,
And at his shoulder Louis Scarapin
Quotes La Fontaine. The giddy winds of fortune
Make love to him that night; and he recalls
Toasts drunk by rocketlight, and Louis’ voice
With its perpetual drawl: “Mon bon monsieur…”
Louis, who could have made the world more sane,
But killed himself instead, a Pierrot-gesture,
His face a whiteness in the dark apartment.

The bitter coffee drunk on early mornings
With Sandra’s straw hat hanging from the bedpost,
Red roses, like a bonnet by Renoir.
And the incessant tapping of her heels
Late evenings on the cobbles as they stroll:
Splinters to tingle in an old man’s brain.
Again the consumptive neighbor through the wall
Begins his evening agony of coughing
Till one is ready to scream him into silence.
And the accordion on the river steamer
Plays something from last season, foolish, gay;
Deaf ears preserve the music of a day.

Life has the final word; he cannot rule
Those floating pictures as he ruled them once,
Forcing them into form; the violent gardener,
The two-edged heart that cuts into every wound,
Reciprocates experience with art.
No more of that for now; the boughs grow wild,
The willful stems put forth undisciplined blooms,
And winds sweep through and shatter.
Here at last Anarchy of a thousand roses tangles
The fallen architecture of the mind.