lystn

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

The Auroras of Autumn Canto 5-10

V

The mother invites humanity to her house

And table. The father fetches tellers of tales

And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.

The father fetches negresses to dance,

Among the children, like curious ripenesses

Of pattern in the dance's ripening.

For these the musicians make insidious tones,

Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.

The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.

The father fetches pageants out of air,

Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods

And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep.

Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.

The father fetches his unherded herds,

Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves

Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch.

This then is Chatillon or as you please.

We stand in the tumult of a festival.

What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?

These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?

These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,

A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:

That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.

Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

VI

It is a theatre floating through the clouds,

Itself a cloud, although of misted rock

And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed

To cloud transformed again, idly, the way

A season changes color to no end,

Except the lavishing of itself in change,

As light changes yellow into gold and gold

To its opal elements and fire's delight,

Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence

And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space

The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.

The theatre is filled with flying birds,

Wild wedges, as of a volcano's smoke, palm-eyed

And vanishing, a web in a corridor

Or massive portico. A capitol,

It may be, is emerging or has just

Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed . . .

This is nothing until in a single man contained,

Nothing until this named thing nameless is

And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees

An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame

Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

VII

Is there an imagination that sits enthroned

As grim as it is benevolent, the just

And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops

To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead,

Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,

Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting

In highest night? And do these heavens adorn

And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted

By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,

Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,

Except as needed by way of majesty,

In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?

It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,

Extinguishing our planets, one by one,

Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

We knew each other and of each other thought,

A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,

Except for that crown and mystical cabala.

But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.

It must change from destiny to slight caprice.

And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele

And shape and mournful making move to find

What must unmake it and, at last, what can,

Say, a flippant communication under the moon.

VIII

There may be always a time of innocence.

There is never a place. Or if there is no time,

If it is not a thing of time, nor of place,

Existing in the idea of it, alone,

In the sense against calamity, it is not

Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,

There is or may be a time of innocence

As pure principle. Its nature is its end,

That it should be, and yet not be, a thing

That pinches the pity of the pitiful man,

Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue,

Like a book on rising beautiful and true.

It is like a thing of ether that exists

Almost as predicate. But it exists,

It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.

So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,

A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.

An innocence of the earth and no false sign

Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,

Lie down like children in this holiness,

As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,

As if the innocent mother sang in the dark

Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,

Created the time and place in which we breathed . . .

IX

And of each other thought—in the idiom

Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,

Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.

We were as Danes in Denmark all day long

And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,

For whom the outlandish was another day

Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike

And that made brothers of us in a home

In which we fed on being brothers, fed

And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.

This drama that we live—We lay sticky with sleep.

This sense of the activity of fate—

The rendezvous, when she came alone,

By her coming became a freedom of the two,

An isolation which only the two could share.

Shall we be found hanging in the trees next s pring?

Of what disaster in this the imminence:

Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?

The stars are putting on their glittering belts.

They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash

Like a great shadow's last embellishment.

It may come tomorrow in the simplest word,

Almost as part of innocence, almost,

Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.

X

An unhappy people in a happy world—

Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.

An unhappy people in an unhappy world—

Here are too many mirrors for misery.

A happy people in an unhappy world—

It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.

A happy people in a happy world—

Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.

Turn back to where we were when we began:

An unhappy people in a happy world.

Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.

Read to the congregation, for today

And for tomorrow, this extremity,

This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,

Contriving balance to contrive a whole,

The vital, the never-failing genius,

Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.

In these unhappy he meditates a whole,

The full of fortune and the full of fate,

As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,

To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights

Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter's nick.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman