The Gavel Falls

WE had to leave the warm tide-water mud,
The warm-flanked wives, the estuary fish,
For an uphill dream and a trap in the beaver mist:

‘Father said Cornwallis was very pale . . . ‘

We braided manes and tails of fallen horses
Into a harness tug a man could wear,
Monongahela, Niobrara, Paint Rock:

‘You’ll write me when you get to Sutter’s River?'

We had to shout last wills and testaments
Over the wing-bone whistles of the Sioux,
We had to chant a cholera hymn to the willows,
We had to learn that beetles taste like acid
When no direction takes you anywhere:

‘Cat’s cradle, cat’s cradle,
Skin of a broken boat . . .'

‘All night we heard him singing rock-a-by tunes . . .'

And a love song in Virginia was a tomb
That sank into the grasses of Missouri:

‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers . .

And a love song in Missouri was a tomb
That sank behind the mountains of the West:

‘There was an American flag in the cedar tree,
You could see it from the Osage orange hedge
Where Grandmother shot the herons to feed the hogs,
And after the war Grandfather paced all night
Between the seven coffins in the orchard. ‘

They brought Minerva’s body home from Kansas,
Hiram came home from Missionary Ridge . . .
‘Begone!’ the old man shudders to the hound;
The slow hound turns away from Enoch’s coffin.
Abraham sleeps. Lucinda coughs no more.

And the gavel falls!

The gavel falls on the sego lilies of Utah,
The gavel falls on Union Street in New Bedford
And the whalers’ wharves at the end of Union Street
Can hear the gavel tapping gourds in Taos,
Tapping a taxicab fender in Atlanta,
Tapping the fossil pollens of Dakota,
Tapping the yellow smelter stack in Butte,
Sequoias, tugboats . . .
‘Look! This came in the mail!’

The gavel is a change and a discipline:
‘They’re going to hold the hearings at the schoolhouse,
The County Agent says we’ve got to be there!’
The gavel ends a dream and begins a dream:
‘The hearings, sir, are in the Venetian Room
On the fortieth floor,’ and the schoolboy is a boaster:
‘Dad had to go to Washington! He flew!’

The gavel is a hunger for long peace,
The gavel is the faith and the prophecy
And a guttling drum and a bugler’s booted cadence
And a mob all sweating salt to a fair messiah . . .

And the fruit flics roar with laughter at the gavel,
And the fruit flies sing absurd genetic songs
About the slow, slow human generations,
And the fruit flies scatter dice among the captains:
‘Caligula was a gentle child,’ they sing,
And they chatter incommunicable nonsense:
‘A bull snake may be thicker than the wrist
Of an economist, but writes no poems.’

So falls the oak leaf on the buffalo robe,
The far pung jingles into the maple bush,
The Pole Star slowly gives its place to Vega
And there’s a farmer up at Custer, Montana:
The ants keep bringing beads to the top of the ant hill,
They always have, and he doesn’t know who it was.