Classic Poem

I knew
a nymph once — nymph
in the mayfly sense at least
of a phase, an aqueous phase,
preceding adulthood. . . . Nymphs
of the ephemeridae ,
indeed, she half lived among,
apter to swim than walk,
as though brookwater, headlong
heedless and mercurial,
were in truth her element. . . .Nymph,
then. Or nymph enough, short
of the immortal...She was twenty-odd. . . .

In another May-month it was,
if lilac and rock-bell and jonquil
and warblers teetering
in the gilt tips of the maples — if
these made a Maytime when
by the bones' almanac and the Doomsday Clock
it was coming on to be Last Solstice — if
such could be a Maytime, then
Maytime it was in that year,
my greybeard fifty-first,
when I sat on the stone stoop
of an eyebrow-windowed house
built in John Quincy Adams' time
(and last painted in LBJ's)
squinting into the sun
and the double cul-de-sac
of old age and Armageddon,
and a red pickup truck came a-swagger
down the dirt road with a load of mulch hay
and Clara, the Clums' new milker, at the wheel,
her hair like an avalanche of brass rings, bright
even in the shadow of the cab, and the sheer
historical impudence of it
overwhelmed the gloom I'd been in
and the girl braked and yelled up
" Tough life you have! Where's your wife? "

" Mercy-calls, " I yelled back
(And without hyperbole. A kettle
of hot soup was en route
to somewhere — the webs and shackles
of this world worn, by one at least,
with a grace that made garlands of them. . . .)

" She shames the saints, " the girl said.
" Where's she want this hay? "

We piled it north of the garden,
some thirty bales; and as if
each one were a year off my back
I'd forgotten by the end of it
all but what warblers or hawkweed —
or a herd-girl in her twenties — knew
of what May meant, what arms meant
when they'd meet sometimes, sweaty,
rank with hay-mould. . . . It was hot,
and the brook was high then,
a heavy jade-grey
crush of cold water jamming
through it from the late rains, and
with the last bale still settling it seemed,
we were both at the trout-lie
and the girl in it, nude as a naiad,
unabashed, breasts bobbing,
thighs glass-smooth, occluded
and dense as the crowded water. . . .
The thing seemed — the thing was —
impossible — though it came
as close to athlos , perhaps, as to eros —
a body in conscious and full function
flung first at a freezing cataract
then at a man, as though
in successive field-events.

And if any man, since Adam,
could have fished for tobacco then
and talked of other things,
let angels praise him. I could contract
to be twenty again or throw
at least, a salute to the old maples
with their new leaves in their arms. . . . As if
the elixir of the Impossible
weren't poured in this world only
to annihilate — like anti-
matter against matter.

But why
it was poured ever, first or last,
Clara never said or only
that the " wailing " of bagpipes
made her " lonesome as the moon " . . . . And yes,
sometimes, to the mere blowing-in
of the drone reeds, wouldn't Clara
come glimmering out of the green tide
of a top-heavy hayfield
like a silkie out of the surf?... No question
a wildness in her answered
a wildness in them. . . .

" There we go! " she said once,
watching two cabbage butterflies
spiraling into the summer zenith. . . .

But there's no Vita . Nothing
but the odd datum, and not much
other-worldly in that: Cheerleader,
prom queen, suburbia,
apostasy to an Ag school,
a milker's and mucker's job
and none to be stunned at the sight of her
but two rows of holstein rumps
because, by a freak un-conjuction
of planets, she was never Discovered
and lifted — another celluloid
Andromeda — into the stars? — No,
it doesn't explain much.
If any words could. But leave it
for one who can wet water
or burn fire to clarify Clara.

Granting of course each eye
brings its own coordinates
to the locus of beauty, still
by whatever calculus, women
and men both brightened
at how Clara'd come on — not
wearing but being a taunting
coral-and-white smile curled
up on one side, dimpling
a cheek like a nectarine's, hair
a corona — banners blowing
in their own wind — and a flesh
surfaceless, trading itself off softly
everywhere into light. . . . Words, even,
from her were mesmeric. Clara's
" Fifty cents, " (I can still remember
her frown of bewilderment
when urged twice to repeat it)
was kitchen-theatre: the lips'
lingering flare on the " f " ,
the alignment behind them of white teeth
on " cents " , the insistent chin thrust
forward and touching with a flicker of scorn
the final sibilant. . . . Yet

above all when I think of Clara
it's her sweet breath I remember,
the odor of warm milk that came from her,
or of moss and brook-water. — Spiritus
Clarae , one could say — the Latin
comes closer. She seemed,
for all her confessed waywardness, free
of some fundamental taint — the fetor
of bad teeth, bad digestion, bad conscience —
and to live by some in-
stinctual hermaneutics
day to day for two years
an Arcadian Now , guiltless
as the waves of the sea are
in whatever comes to toss
on their hollows and swells or parasitize
or their cleansing oblivion — seeing
nothing is promised, nothing exacted. . .
.
After she'd gone — with less trace
it seemed, than the shadblow — and anti-
marriage had annihilated
marriage and like old Rip
in the Catskills I'd waked up
in the future and it was all rust
and cobwebs and even these
shaken by voices in the air,
apocalyptical voices,
crying we'd come too far,
sunlight was cancerous, brook-
water dangerous to drink —
what came then was an odd
paralysis of regret —
regret itself broken
like a board over a stone
between a wildness lost
and a steadiness lost.

It was then, in that bleak lucidity, in-
different as firmament, those
archetypical images —
Great Whale, Wandering Falcon —
arose — and as more than image:
as symbol: verbs in that lost Ur-
logos that ordained the Earth.

Could they still exist? — In this
twilight of nature, twilight
of self, the world turning
into a metaphor
on the impossibility of innocence? ...

... and then that I drove east
to search for mind in the waters
and " crossbows in the clouds"

and one day, perhaps, pipes willing,
penetrate the arcane pibroch
and sound the archaic long
droning discordant bittersweet
Da Capos of defiance and lament,
for the nets of blood and custom
and the hawk's freehold and the whales'

and the white butterflies spiraling
into their summer zenith. . . .