TATE, Allen


The Mediterranean

Where we went in the boat was a long bay

a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--

Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,

And we went there out of time's monotone:

Where we went in the black hull no light moved

But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,

The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,

That boat drove onward like a willing slave:

Where we went in the small ship the seaweed

Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore

And we made feast and in our secret need

Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:

Where derelict you see through the low twilight

The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,

Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night

Eat dish and bowl--to take that sweet land in!

Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless

Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,

What prophecy of eaten plates could landless

Wanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?

We for that time might taste the famous age

Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes

When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;

They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.

Let us lie down once more by the breathing side

Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep

As if the Known Sea still were a month wide--

Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!

What country shall we conquer, what fair land

Unman our conquest and locate our blood?

We've cracked the hemispheres with careless hand!

Now, from the Gates of Hercules we flood

Westward, westward till the barbarous brine

Whelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,

Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine

Rot on the vine: in that land were we born.


Ode to the Confederate Dead

Row after row with strict impunity

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirrs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed leaves

Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament

To the seasonal eternity of death;

Then driven by the fierce scrutiny

Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,

They sough the rumour of mortality.

Autumn is desolation in the plot

Of a thousand acres where these memories grow

From the inexhaustible bodies that are not

Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.

Think of the autumns that have come and gone!--

Ambitious November with the humors of the year,

With a particular zeal for every slab,

Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot

On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:

The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare

Turns you, like them, to stone,

Transforms the heaving air

Till plunged to a heavier world below

You shift your sea-space blindly

Heaving, turning like the blind crab.

Dazed by the wind, only the wind

The leaves flying, plunge

You know who have waited by the wall

The twilight certainty of an animal,

Those midnight restitutions of the blood

You know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze

Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,

The cold pool left by the mounting flood,

Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.

You who have waited for the angry resolution

Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,

You know the unimportant shrift of death

And praise the vision

And praise the arrogant circumstance

Of those who fall

Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision--

Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.

Seeing, seeing only the leaves

Flying, plunge and expire

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,

Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising

Demons out of the earth they will not last.

Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,

Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.

Lost in that orient of the thick and fast

You will curse the setting sun.

Cursing only the leaves crying

Like an old man in a storm

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point

With troubled fingers to the silence which

Smothers you, a mummy, in time.

The hound bitch

Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar

Hears the wind only.

Now that the salt of their blood

Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,

Seals the malignant purity of the flood,

What shall we who count our days and bow

Our heads with a commemorial woe

In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,

What shall we say of the bones, unclean,

Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?

The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes

Lost in these acres of the insane green?

The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;

In a tangle of willows without light

The singular screech-owl’s tight

Invisible lyric seeds the mind

With the furious murmur of their chivalry.

We shall say only the leaves

Flying, plunge and expire

We shall say only the leaves whispering

In the improbable mist of nightfall

That flies on multiple wing:

Night is the beginning and the end

And in between the ends of distraction

Waits mute speculation, the patient curse

That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps

For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

What shall we say who have knowledge

Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act

To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave

In the house? The ravenous grave?

Leave now

The shut gate and the decomposing wall:

The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,

Riots with his tongue through the hush--

Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!