Atlantis: Three Tales (15 page)

“You're quitting your—?”

“Nobody
can write poems and have a job at the same time. It's impossible!”

“You don't think so?” He wondered if he should mention that Clarice worked as a secretary to the principal in the school where Hubert taught—and seemed to turn out her share.

“Do you think I should quit my job because they—not the people I work for, but the people I sometimes write for—asked me to review that silly little girl's silly little book? Of poems?” He crossed his arms severely, hunched his shoulders as if it had suddenly grown chill. “And, of course, they're not silly. Really. They're quite good—a handful of them. But they're not as good as poems I wrote when I was that age. (But doesn't every poet feel like that?) And they're certainly not as good as the poems I could write now!” He rocked a few times on the bench, then declared: “Now who do you think it was who wrote,

“Here's Crane with a seagull and Lola the Drudge,
With one pound of visions and one of Pa's fudge.

“Do you think there's that much fudge—and does anybody ever really notice? Fidge, perhaps? Well, Lowell did in Poe . . .” He rocked a few more times, then began, softly, intensely, voiced, yes, but quiet as a whisper:

“And midway on that structure I would stand
One moment, not as diver, but with arms
That open to project a disk's resilience
Winding the sun and planets in its face.
Water should not stem that disk, nor weigh
What holds its speed in vantage of all things
That tarnish, creep, or wane; and in like laughter,
Mobile yet posited beyond even that time
The Pyramids shall falter, slough into sand,—
And smooth and fierce above the claim of wings,
And figured in that radiant field that rings
The Universe:—I'd have us hold one consonance
Kinetic to its poised and deathless dance.”

He broke off, turning aside, then added: “No, wait a minute. What about this.” Now the voice was louder:

“To be, Great Bridge, in vision bound of thee,
So widely belted, straight and banner-wound,
Multi-colored, river-harboured and upbourne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins,—
With white escarpments swinging into light,
Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
And justified, conclamant with the fields
Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.

“And steady as the gaze incorporate
Of flesh affords, we turn, surmounting all
In keenest transience to that sear arch-head,—
Expansive center, purest moment and electron
That guards like eyes that must always look down
Through blinding cables to the ecstasy
That crashes manifoldly on us when we hear
The looms, the wheels, the whistles in concord
Teathered and antiphonal to a dawn
Whose feet are shuttles, silvery with speed
To tread upon and weave our answering world,
Recreate and resonantly risen in this dome.”

Again the man sat back, relaxed his arms. “All right—tell me: is that the greatest—” he growled
greatest
in mock exaggeration—“poem you've ever heard? Or is it?”

Sam looked up, where arch ran into arch, along great cables. “What's it
about?
” he asked, looking back. “The bridge?”

“It's called . . .‘Finale'!” The man seemed, now, absolutely delighted, eyes bright behind his lenses.

“I get the parts about . . . the bridge, I think. But what's the dome?”

“Ah, that's Sam's ‘starry splendor dome'—from a poem he wrote, called ‘Words.' ‘One sad scrutiny from my warm inner self / That age hath—but the pleasure of its own / And that which rises from my inner tomb / Is but the haste of the starry splendor dome / O though, the deep hath fear of thee . . . .' It goes on like that—and ends: ‘ . . . Another morning must I wake to see— / That lovely pain, O that conquering script / cannot banish me.' Conquering script—I like that idea: that the pen is mightier; that writing conquers.” His eyes had gone up to tangle in the harp of slant and vertical cables, rising toward the beige-stone doubled groin. “Yes, I think I'll use it, make that one mine—too.”

“Can you do that?” Sam asked. “If you write your own poems, can you just take words and phrases from someone else's?”

The man looked down. “Did you ever see a poem by a man named Eliot—read it in
The Dial
a couple of Novembers back? No, you probably didn't. But his poem is nothing
but
words and phrases borrowed from other writers: Shakespeare, Webster, Wagner—all sorts of people.”

“Taking other people's poems,” Sam said, “that doesn't sound right to me.”

“Then I'll link Sam's words to words of mine, engulf them, digest and transform them,
make
them words of my own. Really, it's all right.
You said you grew up on a college campus?” Leaning forward, his face became a bit wolfish. “The word is . . .‘allusion'!”

“I grew up there,” Sam said. “But I didn't go to school there.”

“I see. But look what I've managed to call up! Go on—take a look there, now.” The man nodded toward Manhattan. “What's that city, do you think?”

Sam turned, about to say . . . But the city had changed, astonishingly, while they'd been sitting. The sunlight, in lowering, had smelted its copper among the towers, to splash the windows of the southernmost skyscrapers, there the Pulitzer, in the distance the Fuller, there the Woolworth Building itself.

“Risen from the sea, just off the Pillars of Hercules—that's Atlantis, boy—a truly wonder-filled city, far more so than any you've ever visited yet, or certainly ever lived in.” Behind Sam the man lowered his voice: “I'm a kind of magician who makes things appear and disappear. But not just doves and handkerchiefs and coins. I'm one of O'Shaunessey's movers and shakers, an archaeologist of evening. I call up from the impassive earth the whole of the world around you, Sam—stalking the wild nauga and bringing it all down to words, paired phalluses, bridge between man and man. I create and crumble worlds, cities, visions! No, friend! It is Atlantis that I sing. And poets have been singing it since Homer, son; still, it's amazing what, at any moment, might be flung up by the sea. So:
ecce
Atlantis Irrefragable, corymbulous of towers, each tower a gnomon on the gold afternoon, flinging around it its metric shadow! And you should see it by moonlight—! They speak a wonder-filled language there, Sam: not like any tongue you've ever heard. My pop—C. A.—thinks poetry should be a pleasure taken up in the evening—but not so in Atlantis! No! There, Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi makes as lucid sense as mene, mene tekel upharsin or Mon sa me el kirimoor—nor is it anywhere near as dire as Daniel. But we
need
Asia's, Africa's fables! In Atlantis, when I stand on the corner and howl my verses, no one looks at me and asks, ‘Whadja say?' Because mine's the tongue they speak there. In Atlantis I'll get back my filched
Ulysses
with the
proper
apology. I tell you, all twenty of those dead workers are up and
dancing there with savage sea-girls, living high and healthy in garden-city splendor, their drinking late into the dawn putting out Liberty's light each morning. And the niggers and the jewboys, the wops and the krauts say hey, hi, and howdy—and quote Shakespeare and Adelaide Crapsey all evening to each other. And even if I were to pull a Steve Brodie this moment from the brink of the trolley lane there—watchman, what of the track?—, as long as that city's up, the river would float me, singing on my back, straight into its docks at a Sutton gone royal, no longer a dead end, and I'd walk its avenues in every sort of splendor. You say you saw the empty boat of our dark friend a-dribble over his gunwale? Well, if it was empty, it's because he's found safe harbor there. And he's happy, happy—oh, he's happy, Sam, as only a naked stallion (may St. Titus protect your foreskin in these heathen lands) prancing in the city can be!”

Sam said: “Wow . . . !” though his “Wow” was at the gilded stones, the burnished panes, the towers before him, rather than at the words that wove from behind through the woof of towers ahead. He glanced back at the man, then turned to the city again, where, in a building he couldn't name, copper light fell from one window—
“Oh . . . !
” Sam breathed—to the window below. “Wow.

“Atlantis,” the man repeated. “And the only way to get there is the bridge: the arched nave of this loom, the temple of this stranded warp, the pick of some epiphenomenal gull among them as it shuttles tower to tower, bobbin, spool, and spindle. The bridge—that's what brings us exhausted devils, in the still and tired evening, to Atlantis.”

“That's . . . I mean—”

“Atlantis? There, you can see it, when the sun's like this—the city whose kings ordered this bridge be built. Better, the city grows, weaves, wavers from the bridge, boy—not the bridge from the city. For the bridge is a woob—orbly and woob are Sammy's words: a woob's something halfway between a womb and a web. Roebling's bridge, Stella's bridge, my bridge! Trust me—it wasn't gray, girder-grinding, grim and grumpy New York that wove out from this mill. Any dull, seamy era can throw up an Atlantis—Atlantis, I say: city of mirrors, City of Dreadful
Night, there a-glittering in the sun! Vor cosma saga. Look at those towers—those molte alti torri, those executors of Mars, like those 'round Montereggione. Vor shalmer raga. Look at them, listen: O Jerusalem and Nineveh—among them you can hear Nimrod's horn bleating and Ephialtes' chain a-rattle. Whose was the last funeral you tagged behind, when the bee drowsed with the bear? What primaveral prince, priest, pauper, Egyptian mummy was it, borne off to night, fire, and forever? What mother's son—or daughter—was it, boxed now and buried?
Per crucem ad lucem
. Everything living arcs to an end. Nabat. Kalit. The hour to suffer. It's a dangerous city, Sam.
Et in Arcadia ego
. Anything can be stolen from you any moment. But all you get bringing up the rear of funerals in November is shattered by the sea—for death's as marvelous a mystery as either birth or madness. Go strolling in our city parks, Caina, Ptolomea, Judecca. (The only one I don't have to worry about getting frozen into, I guess, is Antenora—if only thanks to the change of season.)
Li jorz iert clers e sanz grant vent
. Go on, ask:
‘Maestro, di, che terra è questa?'
No, not penitence, but song. I'm still not ready for repentance. See, I'm looking for Atlantis, too, Sam—sometimes I think the worst that can happen is that I'll be stuck with the opportunists in the vestibule—maybe even allowed to loll among the pages of the virtuous
Pagan
. But then I'm afraid you're more likely to find me running in circles on burning sand, under a slow fall of fire—that's if I don't just snap and end up in the trees, where harpies peck the bleeding bark. Mine and Amfortas's wounds both could use us some of Achilles' rust—if not a little general ataraxy. In Atlantis you spend
every
night carousing with Charlie Chaplin—and celebrate each dawn with randy icemen at your knees. In Atlantis, you can strut between Jim Harris and the emperor every day, Mike Drayton squiring Goldilocks behind. In Atlantis, all poets wake up in the morning
real
advertising successes—and cheese unbinds, like figs. Step right up, sit down with your own Sammy, drink a glass of malmsey, and share a long clay stem. When this Orlando is to his dark tower come—when I split my ivory horn in two, bleeding from lip and ear (you think my pop will be my Ganelon and finally pluck me from my santa gesta?)—will they hear me eight miles
or thirty leagues away, the note borne by an angel? You're sensitive, boy—sensitive to beauty. I can tell from your ‘Wow!'—it's a sensitive ‘Wow!' So—
Wow!
—I know you know what I'm talking of. As well, you're a handsome boy—like Jean. Only
handsomer
than Jean; I'd say it if anyone asked me. But there—I
have
said it; and it's still true! That's the job of poets, you know—to speak the terrifying, simple truths, that, for most people, are so difficult they stick in the throat from embarrassment. I mean, what's poetry for, anyway? To write a reply on the back of a paper somebody slips you at the baths with their address on it whom you don't feel like fucking? To celebrate some black theft of goose, cigar, and perfume—rather than toss it out the window at Thompson's?”

Sam had been used to people down home saying, “The Bishop has some
fine
looking boys!” He'd even had two or three girls at the school get moony and giggly about him, fascinated with the silliest thing he'd say. But the notion of himself as
really
handsome . . . ? He pushed his fingertips over the green bench planks, beneath his thighs.

“Actually,” the man said behind him (again Sam looked at the city), “I'm probably as good a poet as I am because I'm quite brave. I'm not some Jonathan Yankee nor yet, really, a Pierrot. But I've trod far shadowier grounds than those Wordsworth preluded his excursion to cover—precisely because they are
not
in the mind of man. Sure. I mean, here a logical fellow must ask: okay, what finally keeps me from it? We have the river's flow—instead of certainty. I could be any old priestess of Hesperus—wrecked on whatever. Am I really going to sing three times? It's a pretty easy argument that, whether in Egypt or at the Dardanelles, with any two towns divided by water, one can always play Abydos to the other's Sestos: for every Hero somewhere there's a Leander, and every Hero has her Hellespont. There's always hope as long as he remembers how to swim. I mean what are you going to do with Eve, La Gioconda, and Delilah—replace the latter two with Magdalene or Mary? Do I covet the extinction of light in dark waters? Three Marys will rise up and calm the roar: sure—Mary Garden, Merry Andrews, and Mary Baker Eddy.