CANTO 14 Soul-struck survivors

 

Soul-struck survivors quake below the half-moon

of unintended anticipation. Let me wake alone

to sarabands and indolent daystars where elves

develop elementary systems of ukelele instruction

and the quag mires in paths predetermined by syntax.

Ullaloo. Subject matters. Verb tension. Coeval adjectival.

Let no burden sway the ministry of self-defense,

or no thought harden the bambis of occult forelegs

that stagger to suck. Swivelling from a base

of no-word’s land, let all trumpets cry that

WRITERS debase a word’s currency. Totems fall

with counterfeit atmans.

The language cone has slippery

sides gleaming with the facets of many lands.

Yet semantic grease makes the county fair

a lot less interesting when all yokels bedevil

the same pig beneath the lard.

The cone takes as its topographical base all the

sea-slugs, anemones, and farthings-worths of every

culture’s lies of tissues, mutating undergrowths

of vining and vinyl verbiage, the whole stock

of the unlocked barrel, and ascends toward a tip

of common roots, culminating in an unconceived

universal tongue; which cone

is more volcanic than Pythagorean, a pimple

on the face of geologic time whose systemizing

is but system-mixing, cystemic, cysterhood,

a bandage over badinage, a badminton of coin of exchange,

hence the problems of translation and all the

cruxes and crevasses up the slopes,

slung up from the dregs of a desperate slice

of an instant so thin you can see the molecules bulging;

this a sly way of suggesting that punning and unexpected

(chance) collocations of words reflect, typify,

emblem-ize the interpenetration of time, space,

and matter; this interpenetration so alive in the

rhapsodic formulations of romantic poets:

in the meanest flower blows clouds of glory

trailing a grain of sand come into being now.

Living and cross-fertilizing in Brownian monologues

of molecular jigs, in cyclotronic discoveries

of particles and participles among the disciples

of the wonderful instant revelations of mind,

in sutra-ing the incisions

of the body-soul symbolist doctrine

of correspondences as in the songs of Yeats

and in colleges of Neo-Platonic schizophrenics—

collocation of the most cunning concatenations of Mind,

the broad-sided avenue where McClure, Coolidge, and Castaneda meet,

where Berrigan dreams Bugs and Charlie Parker

strikes it up with Coltrane while Bergman and Fellini

fenestrate a film where Jung flings I CHING coins

into a fountain where a marble Caligula sings

a Cole Porter ballad about torrid slime-mold.

And there are other cones: cones, triangles,

spirals, vortices, funnel-clouds, storm-systems,

galaxies, abound; but I thought of them as cones

or the whole bag, ball of wax, the ultimate,

the unrepeatable illimitable untranslatable

WINDMILL.