The Mortgaged Heart (39 page)

In God's cosmos according to report
Nothing lapses, no gene is lost
After centuries may bustle in the sport
Which will in time command the line.

Those who find it a little harder to live
And therefore live a little harder,
As struggling gene in oceanic plant
Predestine voluntary cells that give
The evolutionary turn to fish, then beast
With multiplying brain that dominates earth's feasts.
From weed to dinosaur through the peripheries of stars
From furtherest star imperiled on the rind of time,
How long to core of love in human mind?

THE DUAL ANGEL

The world dazed by Satanic glares
Like country children spangled-eyed at county fairs
Seeing no terror in trapeze, kinetic thrill of zones above listening,
And the unheeded shrill of the world lost, rocketing in space,
Despairs of those who are struck down upon Hell's floor and die
—or crawl awhile a little more.
The screams are heard by blasted ears within the radiation zone
And hanging eyes upon a cheek must see the charred and iridescent craze—
Earth orphaned by atom, each man alone.
The furious intellect relating furtherest space to beyondest time,
Exalting abstractions, vaulting the 123,
Defaulting from the simplest kinship, disjoining man from man,
Seeing across oceans, and stumbling on a grain of sand. Almighty God!

After the half a million years this is the century of decision
Between obscenest suicide and Man's transfigured vision.
Here are the flowering plant, beast and the dual angel,
The living who struggles with the weight of dead and,
Recognizing victory, surmises radiance in lead.

FATHER, UPON THY IMAGE WE ARE SPANNED

Why are we split upon our double nature, how are we planned?
Father, upon what image are we spanned?
Turning helpless in the garden of right and wrong
Mocked by the reversibles of good and evil
Heir of the exile. Lucifer, and brother of Thy universal Son
Who said
it is finished
when Thy synthesis was just begun.
We suffer the sorrow of separation and division
With a heart that blazes with Christ's vision:
That though we be deviously natured, dual-planned,
Father, upon Thy image we are spanned.

A
VE

[
Mademoiselle,
July 1952, and
Botteghe Oscure
IX, 1952. On copies sent to friends at Christmas 1951, Carson McCullers noted that it had been written "August 1951, London-December 1951, Nyack."]

There was a time when stone was stone
And a face on the street was a finished face.
Between the Thing, myself and God alone
There was an instant symmetry.
Since you have altered all my world this trinity is twisted:

Stone is not stone
And faces like the fractioned characters in dreams are incomplete
Until in the child's inchoate face
I recognize your exiled eyes.
The soldier climbs the glaring stair leaving your shadow.
Tonight, this torn room sleeps
Beneath the starlight bent by you.

[
Mademoiselle,
July 1957. Also recorded for M-G-M records under the title, "There Was a Time When Stone Was Stone." An earlier version, called "Twisted Trinity," appeared in
Decision
II, 1941.]

Select your sorrows if you can,
Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile.
Adjust to a world divided
Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles
What natural alchemy lends
To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair
The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth's fabled stare.
If you must cross the April park, be brisk:
Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar
Lest you be held as a security risk
Solicit only the evening star.

Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster
And higgledy piggledy giggle once begun
Crown a host of unassorted sorrows
You never could manage one by one.
The world that jibes your tenderness
Jails your lust.
Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts
Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk:
It may be only you can understand:
On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold
When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl
The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man
Beat on the ocean's floor the same saraband.

[Recorded for M-G-M records under the title, "Select Your Sorrows If You Can."]