4695. NO AFFILIATION

NO AFFILIATION

Saul Bellow & Delmore Schwartz, 
at Lahiere's, Princeton, NJ, 1952)
It is a hard life, all this waiting for dawn,

sensing what the Moon will evade, seeing 

the two dippers up high, on black, against 

the night sky. All will be what it is.

-

There are men talking dutifully nearby,

and without any end, it seems  -  they

go on about what they will: streets and

daughters and what their wives last said.

'We have plenty of communication, but

I still want out.' Aha! This jester speaks!

-

I find, anyway, the Jewish curse in all

this foolish talking, about money and

gain and loss and advantage. To take

such pride in a passing moment, it seems

to me, is foolish, as foolish as Life itself.

Especially as a Jew, with all the things

that are otherwise professed. Pippa 

passes, now atone for the rest.

-

I am lost instead  -  of no affiliation like

this : still mourning the American loss; of

plains and Indians, of grains and oceans.

To be frank, my little, loose-limbed darling,

there is nothing left and all I've ever learned

is dead. Man has defied his structures and

an atomic belief in atoms is no belief at all.

-

In sitting with Saul Bellow, there is still a nervousness

left. The grand, old stories  -  all those Jewish ways,

the Montreal beginnings, the guys and goys, from

Lefferts and Chicago, Morningside and Lake Shore

Drive. I haven't held to happenstance myself that long,

and anyway, Delmore Schwartz will never come home.

No, Delmore Schwartz will never come home  -  

having lost his affiliation too.