3042. AND UPWARDS THEY FALL

AND UPWARDS THEY FALL
I am reading Robert Lowell before the lamp goes out;
this is, after all, our rather astringent age and he was
of it still. He saw the cars - 'ten thousand Fords are
idle here in search of a tradition' - with echoes
girdling this imperfect globe. It is, I say without
my usual circumspection, the luckless world we
both inhabit and run from, together. These are
not simple clothes hung out on our line - no shirts
and jackets or pants and skirts - but rather the
thin glimmerings of the textures of our lives and
all their days, the things we talk of and the words
we save; all the items, left limp in the trav'ling
wind, by which we manner our simple ways.
Philosophies and edicts take a second seat to
that. All those deadly Popes and Kings, long
now gone away, never meaning a thing.
-
We've scooted our royalty long away, and - even -
no longer understand the things they once were
wont to say : all those fearsome, land-locked
medieval minds, their concepts of God and Duty,
the kingships once fought for, the dark, narrowing
minions of their dreary and secular ways.
A din of dark-world duties done in the
names of their feckless God.
-
Even, as well, now Lowell lives on far past this
point. His death may have been mannered, but his
grave bespeaks a revolving door, one which never closes,
and one which never - in the same way - opens. He
long before us bought some words with blood and owns
them still. I am reading Lowell; leaning back on a
pale-green wall, window behind me, my feet up on the
sill. There is nothing much more to be said. The past
is the past, and prologue as well.