John And I
Begin the story with a man; curtail
The matter of his hair and hands and eyes.
The simple character will be enough
For bearing out the name—pass by the flesh,
Since this is but a tale and therefore clean
Of the decay that dresses up the soul.
Then tell the wife and woman at one stroke
And let the detail lie uncut upon
The monument of this small artifice.
There was a man to be delivered of
His wife as of a poor witch of the shades
Of plausibility. The unasked help
Of that old fury, accident, sufficed.
She died or was devoured in one swift night
She ripped apart and sewed herself into,
A weighted sack that never bubbled once,
And sank. Perceive him madder than before,
With nothing but a nasty vacancy
In the dark, gangrened spot upon his brain
That she had occupied—repudiation,
But nothing more: an itching, empty sore
That better had been left incurable.
The uselessness of words about this case
Is obvious. The literary end
Establishes a certain calm in us,
If not in him; and he may stop, fall out,
For all we know or care, where we leave off.
And yet, if this is death, how listlessly,
How indecisively the sentence drops,
And not through pity but embarrassment,
The provocation seeming trivial.
Then strip the narrative of mystery
And let it shiver out the meaning like
A naked foetus parted from its womb:
This way a character becomes a man
Impossible to end in words or their
Equivalent in silence. Therefore find
The fellow a good name. John makes a frame
That any not too fanciful idea
Or man can fit into. . . . And John looked out,
Deduced his world and wisdom from the sins
And freaks of creatures not designedly
Alive, but born just in the course of things;
Construed his house among the others. . . .
He was a man as far as he could see,
And where he could not, I, his chronicler,
Began. The woman, among other things,
Confused the issue—yet it was as bad
After her going, for there seems to be
Nothing for me to talk about. A touch
Of night falls upon both of us. John sleeps,
Or else I sleep, my words obscure my words.
I have not done and yet I can't go on—
The articles that make us two divide us,
I am aware only of certain rules
By which he's rhetoric and I a fool,
The one who sets the problem, frets and loves,
While John evades, equivocates, evades.
There was an insufficiency in me
To which no one but John could minister,
A hunger no mere man could satisfy.
If I infringed upon the laws of art
By making John outlast himself till now,
It was to save him from the consequence
Of his genetic artfulness and falseness—
Defection, malice and oblivion.
The laws of art? Could I not alter them?
The reason I must call the passion dead
Lies in an insufficiency in him
That leaves me stranded in a half-told tale.
His name is cold. Life feels the loss when death
Takes off a man, and not at all the corpse;
And so with John and me. Nor do I weep
Or yet deny, confronted with the shame
Of a but literary authorship,
That John and I are better off like this.
The matter of his hair and hands and eyes.
The simple character will be enough
For bearing out the name—pass by the flesh,
Since this is but a tale and therefore clean
Of the decay that dresses up the soul.
Then tell the wife and woman at one stroke
And let the detail lie uncut upon
The monument of this small artifice.
There was a man to be delivered of
His wife as of a poor witch of the shades
Of plausibility. The unasked help
Of that old fury, accident, sufficed.
She died or was devoured in one swift night
She ripped apart and sewed herself into,
A weighted sack that never bubbled once,
And sank. Perceive him madder than before,
With nothing but a nasty vacancy
In the dark, gangrened spot upon his brain
That she had occupied—repudiation,
But nothing more: an itching, empty sore
That better had been left incurable.
The uselessness of words about this case
Is obvious. The literary end
Establishes a certain calm in us,
If not in him; and he may stop, fall out,
For all we know or care, where we leave off.
And yet, if this is death, how listlessly,
How indecisively the sentence drops,
And not through pity but embarrassment,
The provocation seeming trivial.
Then strip the narrative of mystery
And let it shiver out the meaning like
A naked foetus parted from its womb:
This way a character becomes a man
Impossible to end in words or their
Equivalent in silence. Therefore find
The fellow a good name. John makes a frame
That any not too fanciful idea
Or man can fit into. . . . And John looked out,
Deduced his world and wisdom from the sins
And freaks of creatures not designedly
Alive, but born just in the course of things;
Construed his house among the others. . . .
He was a man as far as he could see,
And where he could not, I, his chronicler,
Began. The woman, among other things,
Confused the issue—yet it was as bad
After her going, for there seems to be
Nothing for me to talk about. A touch
Of night falls upon both of us. John sleeps,
Or else I sleep, my words obscure my words.
I have not done and yet I can't go on—
The articles that make us two divide us,
I am aware only of certain rules
By which he's rhetoric and I a fool,
The one who sets the problem, frets and loves,
While John evades, equivocates, evades.
There was an insufficiency in me
To which no one but John could minister,
A hunger no mere man could satisfy.
If I infringed upon the laws of art
By making John outlast himself till now,
It was to save him from the consequence
Of his genetic artfulness and falseness—
Defection, malice and oblivion.
The laws of art? Could I not alter them?
The reason I must call the passion dead
Lies in an insufficiency in him
That leaves me stranded in a half-told tale.
His name is cold. Life feels the loss when death
Takes off a man, and not at all the corpse;
And so with John and me. Nor do I weep
Or yet deny, confronted with the shame
Of a but literary authorship,
That John and I are better off like this.
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