Donald Justice, "Invitation to a Ghost" STR 35:2 (Easter 1992)
Richard Wilbur, "A Barred Owl" STR 35:2 (Easter 1992)
Edgar Bowers "Encyclopedias" STR 35:2 (Easter 1992)
Richard Wilbur, "Valeri Petrov: Photos from the Archives"
STR
36:2 (Easter 1993)
DONALD JUSTICE
I ask you to come back now as you were
in youth,
Confident, eager, and the silver brushed
from your temples.
Let it be as though a man could go backwards
through death,
Erasing the years that did not much count,
Or that added up perhaps to no more than
a single brilliant forenoon.
Sit with us. Let it be as it was in those
days
When alcohol brought our tongues the first
sweet foretaste of oblivion.
And what should we speak of but verse?
For who would speak of such things
now but among friends?
(A bad line, an atrocious line, could
make you wince: we have all seen it.)
I see you again turn toward the cold and
battering sea.
Gull shadows darken the skylight; a wind
keens among the chimney pots;
Your hand trembles a little.
What year was that?
Correct me if I remember it badly,
But was there not a dream, sweet but also
terrible,
In which Eurydice, strangely, preceded
you?
And you followed, knowing exactly what
to expect, and of course she did turn.
Come back now and help me with these verses.
Whisper to me some beautiful secret that
you remember from life.
RICHARD WILBUR
The warping night-air having brought the
boom
Of an owl's voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she
heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
"Who cooks for you?" and then "Who cooks
for you?"
Words, which can make our terrors bravely
clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at
night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy
flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten
raw.
Pity the daft encyclopedist, who
Would satisfy the cosmos in a book As
one
Mind knows all things in one idea,
Though each of them is merely an untrue
Erasable unreal. Yet, as I turn
The elegiac pages to discover
The names Death wrote when you and I were
born,
On every page the host of its faint lights
Is like the signs that furious love would
read
Correctly as the first bright light, before
Its scattering to obscurity, each rapt
Occasion still a letter in the sentence
Perfectly periodic; or like Atlantis
Revived from time's amnesias and indifference,
Each citizen, its sovereign and its joy,
Extravagant with love's true authorship.
And, though you tease my ignorant, out
of date
Neo-illumination and point out
That the entry coded
d'Alembert
is
one
More word and an account between two dates
Lost in the alphabetic disarray,
I praise heroic love, that, in the extreme,
Still bends above the mortal text, to
kiss
The lips that once were heard to speak
it's name.
Old Nazi archives saved for us
These pictures Of
Our friends who died.
Mug-shots, we know, look always thus,
Full face and profile, side by side,
Yet sometimes guilty thoughts arise
Which make us fancy that these men
Have looked once deep into our eyes
And turned their faces from us then.