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Santayana in a Traffic Jam
We are stranded exactly here in sociology,
the disaffected workers and I,
the atheists and the money men
and the woman with a diamond in her nose.
He began to write at Harvard.
The mortal air glimmers along the skyline.
From the doorways of the shopping strip
we confront ourselves.
His Life of Reason in five volumes
was believed to be a masterwork.
About us drift the prevailing credulities
and a most palpable dust.
His Realms of Being was acclaimed
across Europe and America
for its penetration and luminosity.
Beneath us the guts of the city rumble.
Near the end, grave and innocent in his cell
at the convent of the Blue Sisters,
he listened to the Roman distance.
"It is all poetry or nothing,"he whispered.Tradition and the Individual Talent
I sit in the British Museum.
I have stood with the throng at Moorgate Station,
where Eliot passed each morning with his umbrella.
Have trekked across to Dorcetshire,
where Coleridge leaped the Wordsworth's gate.
And up with my notebooks to Coole,
where Lady Gregory served Yeats his soup.
Walked the grounds at Gresham's School,
where Auden played Caliban.
And gone in the summer to Thun,
where Marguerite refused Arnold her love.
I sit in the British Museum.
What about Donald?
Egocentric on a seawall beside the bay,
lapsed parishioner, marathon runner,
Alexander is watching.
Hedonistic on a park bench near city hall,
deep reader, grudge holder, pinto rider,
most impetuous graduate of his year,
Norman is watching the paradoxes.
Acquisitive on a balcony facing the cathedral,
tattooed on both biceps,
fancy dancr, bird feeder, left leaner,
taking his ulcers day by day,
Clyde is watching the paradoxes orbit Earth.What Every Neurologist Knows
In the
crevice
between
thesis and antithesis
orioles
have nested
for eons.
What Tintoretto Knew
"The first human types indistinguishable from modern
man . . . appeared about 40,000 years ago."
The Columbia Encyclopedia.
When he woke to the dawn,
or the pageant on the Grand Canal
or the silks of the Doge's wife,
his eyes tingled
like the fingers of the jewel merchant.
"Darwin was right . . .” Stephen Jay Gould
It was not entirely the marbled facades
nor vines trailing off a balcony
into restless waters,
not only the masts of the exotic ships
nor Colleoni on his heroic bronze horse
that taught him solitude and melancholy
and vehemence and haste,
not only the whores in their yellow kerchiefs
nor the matrons in their black shawls
nor the funeral of Titian at I Frari
that inflamed his obsession
with the humanly real.
". . . about life --- it is absurd to pretend that there is
any plan or meaning in it, but never mind, we will make
a plan and the meaning will be that we are men and
not dogs.” James Gould Cozzens
The walls of scuola and palazzo
and museo and basilica
stood in awe of his passion to depict,
how the mist drifted in from the lagoon
through the gates of the Ghetto
and the cloisters of Santo Stefano,
how the senator postured in his scarlet robe
and the nightingale fluttered in its cage.
How the priest from the Madonna del Orto,
brother to the giant shipwright,
turned his tears to the sky
in The Crucifixion.
How the glassblower from the Rialto,
dice thrower and known thief,
cowered among the crowd
in The Last Judgment.
How the fishwife with the broken nose
wiped her hands on her skirt.
How Saint Lawrence was burned on the iron
and the innocents were murdered.
". . . as we contemplate the galactic disaster that
awaits . . ." Anonymous
How in the Piazza
the children flung out their arms.
How at carnival
the foreheads of the fathers gleamed.
How their mouths were twisted
in joy and alarm.