TERSPECTIVES
Paze Sevets
g 8 EsSaECTIVES Pa e
CONVERSION
He rides alone along the country road,
Thoreau on a bicycle.
Reality, the flex and flow of muscle,
Translates itself through pedals to the ground
In terms of motion, ever faster in descent,
Slower yet more rugged as he climbs approaching hills.
He is fleeing from the groups, the men who grope
With common hopes and plans to mend the world.
The groups forever fighting in themselves,
Stretched taut with the repellant force of members,-
Balloons, each battering the rest,
Yet gently, vainly, fearing lest they burst.
Like Tweedledee and Dum each group; sanctified and rash,
Buoyant with the fantasy of faith;
Each with two dimensions, each a segment of the whole,
Inflated, noisy, vaunting all its strength;
With unity a dogma, each bickers to means,
Bound only by the glitter of its dreams.
The groups with two dimensions point flat paper fingers
To grimly mock his dour complexities.
The spiteful heightless mites who always fail to see
All growth beyond the plane on which they sprawl;
They spatter him with horizontal epithets:
Atheist, fascist, sceptic, decadent bourgeois.
As he rides alone along his narrow road,
Reality of muscle wearies him;
He seeks in vain for quiet, as he seeks in vain for peace.
Wearily he treads, with heavy step, upon himself,
And crushing out his doubt as well as height,
Becomes a little man. He joins a group.
-David M. Stocking
STONE WALLS
Stone walls do not a prison make
But in New England walls are different,
The fields they pace cry out for nourishment
And run down-hill for water to a lake;
These walls were built for mute correction;
The poverty between them moves them not;
They are not nudged by frost or bribed by hot
Fat autumn hands to take a new direction;
They have their friends - the trustee cedar-trees,
The firing warden frost that from his gate
Brings riotous summer low, or makes him state
Complaints that will be answered by the breeze;
Stone walls were built by husbandmen who thrived
On hope alone, who planted without cease
The seeds they thought would lure the sun of Greece
Down east from Attica, but it never arrived;
And so the walls imprison barren hope,
Bleached bone, faint faith, wormed Book, and rusted gun,
For all these fields without a vital sun
Are convicts lying lifeless on the slope.
-Lawrence P. Spingarn
SENSE
Old Norse is stocked with grave delights;
Boileau once wrote an age to rights.
What was it now friend Mather said?
How dare you say Pope's better dead!
I'm sure that nothing more is new -
I'm told that culture's for the few.
I've courted books within these walls
I've envied chaps in overalls.
Remember Dr. Johnson's reign?
You mean to say you've not read Paine?
Look sharp at Plato's values now!
What, never seen a purple cow?
The jealous titles guard their place,
just so .. and dying men embrace.
The print's too fine, the hour's too late -
Somewhere a soldier leaps the gate.
-L. Rich
HERMAPHRODITOS
Friends, our mighty interests have long since
Probed word and gesture with a man's clean knife
Arriving at the heart with a woman's
Touch, abashed but really content.
Abilities we had were driven upwards
To map seas from a height, and our bodies
Wrought to pass through crevices; we assumed
In good form talents that we lacked:
The man's thrust, the woman's parry, for sex
Is hailed under no stone when our richest
Contract needs the soul tempered like a blade
That can sing as well as sever,
Can cool the flesh or bleed unlustful veins.
Friends, did you know it the double office,
Polar and universal, and Love quite
Blind; scared, and a child at his work?
--Irving Ij Weiss AZ
TWENTY-ONE
"To woman:
She needs no eulogy:
She speaks for herself."
Elegies and elegies
And elegies
And beer.
A kaledioscopic pattern
Jumbles and juggles the
Most insignificant
Nothings and
Nothingnesses.
Scrumpets, humpets,
Plumpets and dumpets,
All one.
Home is such a warm place,
with cats.
Here there are not cats -
Mice tho' thrive!
People,'little clown-people
Rumble and pour and
Tumble
Into small doors
And are magnified
In their beer-dreams
And reflections in foam
Toss back
Pseudo-Van Gochs and
Napoleons and
Picassos and
Freuds and
Sandburgs
And all others greater
Than these
But:still little and
Much of the moment.
"Thus conscience does make
Cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sticklied o'er with pale cast"
Of "Stroh's."
No more.
No music but the fussy jangle of glasses
And forks and knives
And never ceasing voices hardly
Blended in the futile exchange
Of futile ideals
And the puny gods that instigate
Them, in the
Red plush of their boudoirs.
While gnawing at slivers
Unseen in table tops.
And beer reeks and men reek
And hell is here.
But love and the breeders
Of petty love that is
Youth is here too,
Singing -
Beta-Theta-Cata
Mucha too Lata
And we bid farewell to the Bell
And go to warm beds
And frost bitten dorms
And plunging into the
Welcome arms of an
Unseen. Morpheus
Seek rest
And rest
No beer
Here.
But rest.
-Joan Clement