MEDUSA

This is the face, the penetrating eyes,
Merciless and all knowing, that in time
Gaze on the helpless flesh of men, surprise
Spirits that love, that labor, and that climb
Over steep rocks, turning their breasts to clay
To stone in the swift sculpture of defeat.

I saw a cinema or dead cells, they lay
Like lava pellets, or bubbles on the moon,
All life had left them, they were ghastly gray,
They were as shattered glass by mischief strewn:
Medusa had gazed on them.

Whence was fled
The spirit that made them whir and dive, divide?
Being now lifeless matter, being dead
Was there no motion in them to provide
Motion in turn? They seemed beneath
The moon's sway, they seemed luminous particles
Of the moon that has no water, and no breath;
The moon, it may be, where Medusa dwells,
Presiding over tides and lives, as death
Moves life at will, but is by life not moved.
Then is there in these cells,
So Gorgonized, a something not all bereft
Of motion, but still active, though unproved?

Perhaps with this regard one hope is left:
As substance still the nucleus goes on
dancing, though slower to the harmony
Of deeper music, that of trancèd stone;
With cells of flesh, therefore, this thing may be.

But why should I be made to guess the stage
Of being after Medusa stares the flesh?
Why mine the pain, that nothing can assuage?
Why mine dishonor and a barbed mesh?
Why turned to me forever but one side
Of the sphere, and that a hope, while like the moon
The other side is never by men described,
Which may be eternal darkness, and a swoon
Of ice where souls, like lifeless cells are brought
By winged Medusa?

But this much I know:
Medusa, like a ghost
Rising all suddenly, where she may choose,
Transfizes men to their soul's innermost
Being, and fills full with granite juice
Veins, nerves and heart, eyes, hands and lips.
What happens then to flesh made syenite?
Medusa knows, perhaps. Like a snake that slips
Into a crevice, after its deadly bite,
She steals away, her witchcraft being done--
Death is Medusa and turns men to stone.

January 4 1938.

MIDNIGHT WALK TO THE RIVER

In August when the soul suspires,
And earth lies spent with summer fires,
Somehow I walked into the night,
A wakened spirit roused to flight,
Obedient to its second sight.
Somehow I rose up, wandered and walked,
Out to the town's edge, half in sleep.
And soon I saw the half-mile steep,
And then the mansion of Horace Wood,
There on the hill's top as I climbed,
And as the village church-clock chimed
The midnight's hour solemnitude.
The Psychagogoi raised up souls,
The Ostologoi gather bones.
This was the hour when graveyard stones
Tilt and totter for burrowing moles.
Was this my night's samsara, still
In the bonds of time and space and will?

Around me hovered, but never blew
The ghost of what had been a wind.
I toiled up where the gulleys grinned,
And where clay banks by rain were thinned.
Near and afar the roosters crew,
Along the upland, below the hill,
And in the bottoms the whippoorwill
Called to the prairie. I seemed to see,
And even aided by the sky's
Twilight, as of a crag on fire,
Hidden behind a mountain's wings,
Into the secret depths of things,
With sorcery, with yogin eyes,
Which looked upon the motionless earth
As if it were an abandoned garth,
Cleared of confusion, life's desire.

Past Horace Wood's I saw the road
Ahead of me as on I strode.
And round me, as a cobweb clings,
Seemed presences, from some abode,
From haunts, from spaces, from the past,
From memories, from the overcast
Sky where the light seemed to exist
As fulvous silence mixed with mist,
With paste of stars, or nebulous sand.
And here what stillness on the land,
What breathless bistre on every hand!

Midnight Walk. . 6

The staple, while he stood and watched
The iron tongue, at last unlatched.
He stood there, but I never looked.
For now I thought 'twas Captain Nance,
The grandson of old Thomas here
Who perished at the Marne in France.
No matter. Still I did not peer
To see his face. His hood was drawn
Over his eyes, which he had on.

I wondered still why he kept timing
His steps with mine, and did not leave me,
But with my measured walk kept rhyming.
Was he intending to deceive me?
But he was neither human nor ghost,
He was regret, a memory,
A something forgotten, but not lost,
Another, myself, a history,
A ruined and mourned antiquity,
A consciousness by sorrow crossed.

Passing the gate we onward paced
A path where giant weeds effaced
All but the sky. And there were smells
Of fish, sick mud and fenny dells,
And green swamps where the rice-eel dwells.
No whippoorwills were here, no crows
Of roosters on the air arose.
An air night-laden, stuffed with heat,
Where life has scales and fangs, no feet,
Made breath come slowly as we trod
The rut, the summer-hardened clod.
Why did we go on? Yet vain to ask
It was somehow my destined task.
It was my long life's fated path
Marked out by stern, retributive wrath.

Huge cottonwoods surrounded us,
Dense drooping willows, prophetic oaks,
And jimpson weeds whose odor chokes
The air, all these and serpent vines
Were by the muddy river that twines
The snake infested shore by which
Huge frogs leaped to escape the coil
Of sliding hunger on this soil,
Hot as Maremma's pestilent fen,
For every crawling filth a den
spawned in the sick swamp and the ditch.
Here where no zephyrs stirred the trees
Was hiding that Harpocrates,
The god of silence. And bats as black
As his cloak was flitted between

Midnight Walk . . 7

The branches of this accursed terrene,
Upon a fluttering, dipping track.
Sometimes there was an insect's shrill,
For an instant only, then all was still--
There was no song of the whippoorwill,
No crowing of the cock, whose charms
Gave wonder to the midnight farms.

I dreamed now that this long way meant
That I had broken faith with the Powers
That lead us safely and guide our hours.
In spite of my consecrate intent
No less this was my punishment,
For having slurred the Harmony's Code,
While following to my best the road.
And further this walk was given me
To show what after death should be:
That through strange regions up and down
I should go walking on and on
Through never-ending eternity:
For he who heaven shall offend
Has none to pray to as a friend.

And now there were large drops of rain,
Like blood that in an instant drips
From wounds internal, from the lips,
When eyes stare knowing deathly pain.
And then a ruined corn-crib showed
Just at the end of the river road,
Where the river farther walking stopped,
And where the bank to the river dropped.
He hastened thither, quickly sped
Beyond me and opened the battered door,
And pushed me in on the broken floor.

And suddenly then I was aware
That spite of danger overwatched,
And spite of reverence and prayer,
And spite of courage, prudence, thought,
That at this last my soul was caught:
For as a something one would dispatch
He quickly turned and latched the latch.

And I sat there and cast my eyes
Between him, watching from a stump,
And the river that for long centuries,
And all my life had just been flowing
Past horse-weeds and past locust clump,
Past ditches, but to no end going,
Save to a river, and that to a river,
Winding, winding, winding on,

Midnight Walk . . 8

As it had done from dusk to dawn,
While I was in cities, oblivious, gone.
A river flows and flows wherever
Your absent feet move with life's fever.
You can come back to it and find
It flowing still, intent and blind,
Ever and never the same, but going
Into fresh forms with ceaseless flowing.

I sat there waiting, while his cape
Was drawn down over averted eyes,
And while his cloak was a disguise
For his suspected and fearful shape.
I sat there hearing serpent things
Slip from the river banks, from logs
Into the river, I heard the wings
Of gnats, mosquitoes, and felt their stings,
I heard the all-night croak of the frogs.
Great roaches climbed from many a crack,
And hungry rats and timorous mice
Scampered the floor. And there were lice,
And fleas and ticks. And soon a black
Long snake came daily to lick his tongue,
And look on me so pained and stung.
And I imprisoned looked at him
There on that stump in the jungle dim.

He was not Abram Rutledge now,
He was not now Napoleon Greer,
Nor the grandson of old Thomas Nance,
He was some kind of a karma brow
That walked with me as pioneer,
As soldier with indifferent glance
Who tracked me after a many year;
He was the past that made my fate,
As fate is unemancipate.

September 25, 1939