In Full Throat of Life

Abstract

In Full Throat of Life Robert Bense (bio) Capriciousness of Nature —after Poussin’s Arcadia Snakes narrow the focus of their strike here. From a necessary caution grew natural law. Eurydice this morning, or the girl you remember from wherever, hurries to rendezvous at the well. Her scrubbed flesh trusting its nakedness. Pagan prelapsarian. At the paradisiacal park light dances on dark water. Yet it’s not time for reflection. Hillsides cubed by Cézanne have spied on Poussin’s fields. The public columns of rectitude have been overturned. Old tombs are encrypted in their griefs. Roman temples retreat to the horizon. Italian towers rise in the foreground. History is sharpening its talons. Field smoke climbs from the mountain-sides. Always the rural Latin sacrifice of its future. [End Page 282] For the world enters here wholly intact. And may slip away anytime like a Sunday afternoon shadow wandering into the meadow behind the green mountain. For now it leaves late morning disguised as spring dressed just in time. Beauty Pacing the Sky Angels are deadly birds of the soul, Rilke almost said. He called them, in his anguish, “pampered darlings.” Those in whom beauty lasts have been granted only one favor. Everyone else races to silhouette. To funereal pearl. Recall those soft-set eyes in catacombs. Large and sensual. Limned in red and black. The young curls no longer touched by Eros. Only eons ago dancing at Tivoli, twisting cypress wreaths. Hidden now in escaping shadows— what can interrupt the dark dreams of their nights? Any day they will return from exile, if exile it is, tables set, pears brought in fresh from an orchard. Nothing too extravagant, of course, to swell the universe. A glass of old Falernian. The sweet-sour human smells angels are likely to miss. [End Page 283] Retreat into White The dead are gone, and I have let them go dressed too lightly for the bitter days. Travelers on their way through drifted snow robed only in the light swiftness of shadow as they lean across the porch, the yard, always taking with them memories I let go: after cries, the rattle, a subtle pall of snow that falls upon the past, their weighted eyes paying the silver toll for a river scow —the dead in full throat of life once knew the thoroughfares, now know the back ways they need to take, and where they have to go past night-held torches, row after row of gondolas tied to posts, past icy quays. Their half-familiar ghosts huddle in a glow forgetting their addresses, whatever they knew, until they reach that place where winter stays. The dead are gone, and I have let them go, taking us with them, deep into snow. [End Page 284] Robert Bense Robert Bense’s poetry has been described as “music across a great distance.” In 2007 he published Readings in Ordinary Time, his first collection of poetry. Copyright © 2012 University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee