The Sunlit Surfaces

Ein Bild des Glaubens ist das schöne Weib:
Sie ist ein ja, und sie ist grenzenlos.
– F. Schuon

The summer sun brings tables out on the sidewalks.
At the age of 60, sitting in a café,
He becomes conscious again how someone’s knee
– The conniving perpendiculars of thigh and shin,
The complex full and hollows of the kneebone –
Compels desire, and with desire, longing.
(Desire is by its nature ever-new,
Drives to self-quenching action, whereas longing
Strives without wanting, is the blaze itself.)
His gaze returns, and nothing else intrigues it.
A woman’s body wakens consciousness
So intense it leads to stupor unless managed,
Held back by fire-breaks or, by a barrel, aimed
At some particular target. How one longs
To die, to drown, in those ogival planes!

Formerly, of course, it was unbalancing glimpses,
Rapunzel’s mighty hair, the arms of mermaids,
Where matter seemed to blur its self-containment.
The elaborate ship, that slipped its moorings, vanished
At once in fog, left only churning water
To slap and splash under a midnight wharf.
Later, the fog had lifted, but the ship
Now seemed prosaic, seemed like a rowing-boat
Oared clumsily by children, going in circles;
And then – sea-bells! the lovely bunting fluttered,
The raffia streamers could no longer hold the
Moving liner. Small tugs drew out ahead,
With rigid cables over their shoulders.

All that
Carried the charm of novelty, gone now
Yet never quite supplanted: mind knows the truth but stays
A happy victim: summer after summer
The ordinary chaos of the body,
Combed and combined and primed for provocation,
Emerges like artillery onto the street
And guns him down like Tammuz, laughing
As he is dismembered. You’d wish for him,
If he had his life again, that someone would
Warn him effectively about July.

Yet maybe you’d be wrong. The thoughts of sex,
Those hilarious putti carrying Mars’s helmet
Which leave nobility naked, draw us toward
The proximate flesh, the face, the watchful eyes
We had forgotten at our grown-up distance.
Body is known – we don’t struggle to recall it,
Although we had forgotten –
Is known so strangely that its closeness speaks
With a sudden shock the only human language
In the gross backdrop of inhuman hubbub.
In which propinquity (O Margarethe!
O Shulamith!),
You are named uniquely, thought sweetens and divines
What poets meant by those insistent potencies –
Penelope, Mary, das Ewig-Weibliche,
The child whom boyish Dante loved, and found
His guide to Heaven when he got there finally:
Which image, deeply established, changes everything,
Clouds, winds and ocean into breath and blood.

Now in this café in the silencing sunlight,
Aware of youthful flesh, he has awakened
From the stark surfaces of knives and buildings,
Figures in matter which he may acknowledge
But which won’t answer him. Conceive that racing ship
Over the dazzling ocean where Isolde
Sleeps in the prow. Both she and you have drunk
The potion, and your destinies are fixed
Now, regardless of physics. Heart-mysteries there,
As Yeats might say, yet all still held in matter,
The stuff of which you are made. Your thoughts are free
To go apart, yet all your freedom
You will spend in re-uniting. Here then is the god Amor
Whose inner name is Joy, whose viewless force,
Like the swimmer crashing down through emerald water,
Discovers to you void, astounding depths
– How suddenly entered! like happening on a secret –
No way conflicting with the sunlit surface.