I am not one his bread who peppers
With stars of nebulous illusion,
But learned, with soldiers, mules, and lepers
As comrades of my education,
The Economy of desolation
And Architecture of confusion
On the bare sands, where nothing else is
Save death, and like a lark in love,
Gyrating through the vault above,
The ace of all created things
Flies singing Gloria in Excelsis
And spreads the daybreak from his wings:
I found a horse’s empty cranium,
Which the hyenas had despised,
Wherein the wind ventriloquised
And fluting huskily afar
Sang of the rose and the geranium
And evenings lit with azahar.
Foaled by the Apocalypse, and stranded
Some wars, or plagues, or famines back,
To bleach beside the desert track,
He kept his hospitable rule:
A pillow for the roving bandit,
A signpost to the stricken mule.
A willing host, adeptly able,
Smoking a long cheroot of flame,
To catalyse the sniper’s aim
Or entertain the poet’s dream,
By turns a gunrest or a table,
An inspiration, and a theme—
He served the desert for a Sphinx
And to the wind for a guitar,
For in the harmony he drinks
To rinse his whirring casque of bone
There hums a rhythm less its own
Than of the planet and the star.
No lion with a lady’s face
Could better have become the spot
Interrogating time and space
And making light of their replies
As he endured the soldier’s lot
Of dissolution, sand, and flies.
So white a cenotaph to show
You did not have to be a banker
Or poet of the breed we know:
Subjected to a sterner law,
The luckless laughter of the ranker
Was sharked upon his lipless jaw.
All round, the snarled and windrowed sands
Expressed the scandal of the waves,
And in this orphan of the graves
As in a conch, there seemed to roar
Reverberations of the Hand
That piles the wrecks along the shore.
Twice I had been the Ocean’s refuse
As now the flotsam of the sand,
Far worse at sea upon the land
Than ever in the drink before
For Triton, with his sons and nephews,
To gargle and to puke ashore.
To look on him, my tongue could taste
The bony mandibles of death
Between my cheeks: across the waste
The drought was glaring like a gorgon
But in that quaint outlandish organ
With spectral whinny, whirled the breath.
The wind arrived, the gorgon-slayer,
Defied the wind that rose to whelm it,
And swirled like water in the helmet
Of that dead brain, with crystal voices,
Articulating in a prayer
The love with which the rain rejoices—
The zephyr from the blue Nevadas,
Stirrupped with kestrels, smoothly rinking
The level wave where halcyons drowse,
Came with the whirr of the cicadas,
With the green song of orchards drinking
And orioles fluting in the boughs.
All the green juices of creation,
And those with which our veins are red,
Were mingled in his jubilation
And sang the swansong of the planet
Amidst the solitudes of granite
And the grey sands that swathe the dead.
All I had left of will or mind,
Which fire or fever had not charred,
Was but the shaving, husk, and shard:
But that sufficed to catch the air
And from the pentecostal wind
Conceive the whisper of a prayer.
And soon that prayer became a hymn
By feeding on itself. The skies
Were tracered by the seraphim
With arrows from the dim guitars
That on their strings funambulise
The tap-dance of the morning stars.
When frowsy proverbs lose their force
And tears have dried their queasy springs,
To hope and pray for crowns and wings
It follows as a thing of course,
When you’ve phrenologised the horse
That on the desert laughs and sings.
I leave the Helmet and the Spear
To the hyena-bellied muses
That farm this carnage from the rear:
But of the sacrifice they fear
And of the strain their sloth refuses
Elect me as the engineer.
Make of my bones your fife and organ,
Red winds of pestilence and fire!
But from the rust on the barbed-wire
And scurf upon the pool that stinks
I fetch a nosegay for the Gorgon
And a conundrum for the Sphinx:
For all the freight of Stygian ferries,
Roll on the days of halcyon weather,
The oriole fluting in the cherries,
The sunlight sleeping on the farms,
To say the Rosary together
And sleep in one another’s arms!