Winston

For the third time the gifted freshman student gave to Shenandoah a composition less than three hundred words long, although one thousand words were required.

"Mr. Winston", said Shenandoah, "you are a gifted student, but I must ask you to write compositions of the same length as your peers. This composition is less than three hundred words in length".

"The Sermon on the Mount is also less than three hundred words, Sir", said Winston, rosy-cheeked, strong, and serene.

"If you will come to the river", said Shenandoah, "and walk on the water for me, then I will give you a passing grade, Mr. Winston".

"I will wait until the river freezes over, Sir", said Winston.

"I am not a native", said Shenandoah, "but I am told that it does not freeze over during some winters, which are mild."

"Perhaps it will freeze over this winter, Sir", said Winston.

"Enough of this discussion of the weather, Mr. Winston", said Shenandoah, "these exchanges are unworthy of both of us!"

Noah,
O Captain of the blue and unforeseen
(Expected unexpectedness of mariners),

Will it avail

To say to Psyche, "Don't look Love in the face!"
(Love, the dark victor, whom no one defeats)

Avail to tell Narcissus not to look

Too long in any glass, or he will plunges,
Nausea and boredom being the self's true end?

--What knowledge will avail, sea-borne,
as who should speak

Maxims to the North Atlantic's senseless sways.

One said, and some still say, "O know yourself!"
(To know the self; yet, not to love the self.)

But he who listens to a shell

Hears only his heart's roar,
Loud and inchoate, bruited as a chute.

On shipboard afternoons, ardent for Ararat,
A little boy might study these poor truths.

"Were there no future time,"
A fat sad wise man said this long ago,
"I'd ride all day long in a handsome cab
Closed, with a pretty lady next to me."

(Love, the dark victor, whom no one rejects!)

--Amid quotations of the wakeful sea,
Amid the chortle of the beats below,
Before the horizons' bluegray distances,
Before the falling rising night and day,

#5A

These sentences, pretty as fireworks,
Might sparkle for our budding prodigy:
Let his be Adam's look, the day Creation stopped;
And yours be Abel's as his brother struck;
And in and under and over the seas,
Let him behold in you the Magi's amaze,
When, as if ordinary as a bread,
The waiting women showed them the little child.

A great while ago the world began!
I CAME.
This is where you come-in--
Arithmetic is true of everything,
Playing cards, tickets, pinnies, trees, and men
Boring as counting your toes, monotonous
As box-cars' repetition on the track,
--But one and one are sometimes two,
sometimes three,
And sometimes sixty-nine: remember that!
(Noah will help you understand these things).

Noah will tell you of great Rome's decline,
Noah will tell you of the Caesars who
Suffered such passion that their foreheads burst,
Noah will show you, on the vacant seas,
How little we know, how dark the future is.

The sleep still in your eyes,
Lips parted in surprise,

dear little boy,

"You can't have everything",
But you must choose, and as you choose you lose,
One of the first things little boys should know--

Though promiscuity appears like grapes,
Fat and green, fat and blue, just to grasp,
You only marry for the first time once,
--If like the Turk you wed a dozen girls,
You can't have one and only one for fun,
You can't have any thing, if you have all,
It's not the same, it's never just the same,
(It is a different thing with every one

DON
GIOVANNI
STORY

THE TRIP BY CAR

THE occasions come back to me. The trip by car
Was not a journey on the map

between two towns,
Albany and Saratoga. It was an exhilaration

At going away and going somewhere new--

Later, a tiredness (motion jiggling the kidneys)

At watching the road, handling the wheel,

toing the gas-pedal.

We passed Socony, passed the last green light,

the end of Saratoga,

Speeded on the open highway, U.S. 9, past post

after post

Of the telephone company, the simple black lines on which
Voices are crucified. (Your images, said Hivnor,

Are those of the student, tourist, and vacationist,

And he was right. But the same, he said, is true.

Of Shakespeare and myself!) We passed caws grazing,

a small stream,

A bridge across the Mohawk river, Gothic and bare,
And climbed a hill and the car lost power, striving,

Regained it as we went down once more,

(Brilliant! said Berryman,

The word he always uses when impressed):

A whitewashed line defined the road's two halves,

And I kept close to it, far from the right hand side,

conscious, half-conscious,

Active habits guiding me, guiding the car,

The image of the road ahead dwelling in my gaze,

but not my attention.

I tried to look, to feel, to see, green hill, small farm,
Auto-camp of small bungalows in a single file

like out-house, dog-house, or toy,
As aspects of our culture, our values, our divinities.

THE TRIP BY CAR

Images please me, but I look away,
So much more interested in "what it means",
the generality
true for you and true for me:

Metaphor is, said Alexander's teacher,
The hallmark of genius. O it is, I see,
The one actual formal thing no other art,
No painting, music, statue, or movie
can provide:
Let me look for it more often, since I enjoy it;
he is,

Let me say of some new author,
a tourist of the heart,
He sees what the guides show him, nothing more,
much less
Than the blind beggar, the playing child,
the cook
In the kitchen all day long, at night in bed
with the chauffeur or the butler,
He sees what he wants to see, diletante, diletto,
Vistas, sunsets, old monuments, and fancy rugs,
Good restaurants and special dishes, quaintness, strange-
ness,
Never the psyche struggling to realize its values.

The road familiar after several trips, I start to look,
I start to ask myself
(Tired of driving, the freshness worn off already)
How far we have come, galnce at the mileage,
--What was it at the start?--think of the trip in return,
A tedious thought

(psychologize, psychologize,
open the human heart and mind, and all will look,
As quickly as at scenes of sexual pleasure,
Two lovers taking off their clothes, touching each other,
the strangeness of naked human flesh,
the brown-pink of nipple and penis).

A JOURNEY to something new, a journey away
From habit and emptiness, a journey through the heart
By means of the Chevrolet

between Sagatoga and Albany,
As one has exercised to whip the dogged body,
and glow with repossive
eddying blood.