by Robert Lietz
Fred Donald Archer, owner of a gold-filled capped Venus fountain pen, is a veteran of World War Two and Korean action. From 1957 through 1966 he was Vice-President, aspiring to the Presidency, of The Day School of Business. Archer is the speaker of the poem, reflecting on the plateau his career has reached, apparently end-stopped because, he suspects, of his family-origins in rural poverty.
Imperial
February , 1966
"The swans complain,
bark like murder
as another season starts.
He trades on rooms
declared to his own honor,
refreshed by these
who choose up sides,
indulge themselves
and call him President.
The fountain dancing
in high-ceilinged light,
complements
the claret glowing into song,
the faces glowing
into song, that glide
among
and shine along these walls
to his amusement,
pursuing futures
in his word,
scions of beer and blood
and cigar-making
gone haywire, enlarging
the swans' wild script,
exciting the looks of partners
shaken now by trespass.
Let the swans declare
a creature's hankering
for space! And let this
latter Day profess!
Let whispering, full of gossip,
skin, begin this run
of his grey fingers
at cup's brim!
*
Why ask a quartered thing
to speak? Ask
angels after all, compulsive
travelers, to reveal
worlds to him, 50 years
keeping the stables clean,
convening this bright processional,
these voices,
adding shells to shells,
as pebbles
skim and sink, as waters
absorb
the mystery, a spirited dust
absorbs the lead guitar
and nectarines?
*
These toads, this hunchback,
pondering
warmed stone, raised there
to keep their witness
and keep seen, abide
as harnessed things
abide, and, in percussing
starlight now,
his high-wire public self,
pronouncing boulevards,
planting his well-made shoes
that cannot hold the slope,
groping the surrounding air
to steady his descent.
They applaud to join him,
over pot chunks
and dealt bread, expecting
one, of the many stones
to float, one of the many dreams,
laid out on water
as the wine-level drops,
having come to him
for this, a ping of voices
approaching out of doors,
that dulls at his address,
a cartsman-made
philosophy, dissolving
into them, as lost
as Europe had been lost,
and the inflections
lost in last names
on promotion.
*
Could that sideyard litter
of Plymouths
and junked Fords, (none of them
worth the quart
it takes to try them out,)
flare brightly in this dark,
as if the space, the harpsichord,
the hammered strings,
were not more personal,
and fluttering brushes
not enough, to set between
a man and his deep travel,
where he appears to find himself,
feeling the chips of light
that form between some men
and their apparel?
*
And here, at the edge
of woods squared off
by the State routes and Interstate,
I watch the squirrel
burn, a high-wire gasp
I stop to marvel at,
dismantling hibernal light,
taking apart what dreams
of rich retirement, as lost
as once
the colors of the barnboards
had been lost,
and as these nightly dead
a man
would take up with his breakfast,
leaving the faces
up to him, kids
nobody
talked out of their nightmares,
and this feel
of Lent ahead, in his
Ash Wednesday
services."
