B-24

TIME We move
On bearings of the hours now:
They have replaced the threaded beads of weeks
(That turned the months to shadow as the months
Rolled years into disuse). We fly
From April to November while the clock
Has scarcely stirred its accuracy: the blossom
Is fruit at once. We seek
The east in westward flight, prolonging madly
The day’s full duty. Time
Becomes a breathing of swift thoughts, condensed
On the clear glass of speed,
Till twenty thousand statutory dreams
Add up to distance.

U. S. A. First we fly over home:
Home is a big word for a vast thing.
Through these high lenses
Home’s a giant, seated,
Feet in the shoals of the Atlantic
(O salt air remembered!),
Knees in Missouri, hands braced back
Hard on the submarine and lovely
Ledges past California, High and swift
We climb towards night, but day outruns us;
We burst from savage shaking of soft mist,
And all the fertile spring green of the land’s lap
Lies buried deep under fresh fall of cloud.
Now in the sun, sooner
Than the mind dares, the mountainous shoulders
Rear towards us, shawled in snow. The head
Has stars for eyes westward, has dawn for mouth,
Hears with great granite and untimbered ears.
Now down the long, steep gradient of its back
We plunge to sunset in a salty sea
Whose blue’s so rich it has denied its hoard
Of salt to the waiting air.

PACIFIC The plane lifts now (over that ocean):
Complex of clever metal that responds
To the wise touch of youth;
Myriad horses
Driven with a light young hand. Laughter
Informs a score of dials
With knowing faces. This schoolboys’ room
(Geography: mathematics: victory)
Is lit with gayety through a plastic dome
Where sweet and twenty’s strung
Its fifty-caliber jokes,
Brass wrapped.

Those white, white flowers that bloom
And fade on cobalt silk ten thousand feet
Toward gravity, those water flowers of foam
Grown on the vine of a lost wind,
Tell drift to a child’s eye.

This small and breathless circling
Of bleached ribs that surround
Aquamarine unfaceted,
Coral’s deep bronze beneath a sulphate veil
Contained in lapis, this gleam of coppered white,
This treasure trove,
This soft-named naked islet,
Appeared as a pole star in inverted heaven
Of endless cloud reflections because a boy
Peered through a glass darkly, and has laughed
Through ordered numbers
At infinite distance remedied.

Night has outflown youth: in its cavern
The sweep of the Great Bear lies drowned in the north,
Submitting to new tropic stars, a Cross
To redeem darkness, and youth sets
Muted and multiple power gently on coral dusk,
Finding a pinprick to rest on, a dot that lay
Charted in white blankness, a glyph
That could read certainly
Into an island’s greeting and farewell
Where laughter may lie briefly in screened sleep
Against tomorrow’s storm.

SOUTH-WEST Here the green terror of deliberate death
Grows rankly on volcanic soil, on coral
Made lonely by much sea. Here
Sorrow outranks joy, honor salutes
Its captain, grief. Here
Proud death lies wrapped in a long weave of pain
Civilian-wise and uniform. Here flight
Begins at endings. Here laughter
Marries fatigue, and youth
Beds with a solitary sleep. Journey
Is ended and the strong
Survive for tension. Here life
Destroys itself in heat under a sun
That has forgotten the compassionate snow.