4. A SONG OF DESTINY
The moon shone, and so the stars
beat down from their chambers of gold.
Where have you come, unknown to us before,
and where is the world?
I come from a star
whose life is light, whose light the years
send forth; whose emanations, radiant, are
the realization of the earth;
whose emanations, lost within the sea
of constellations,
fall betimes unknown:
much as the ancient mariner makes his way
through silent seas,
through constellations
and galaxies, until the end
of all their wanderings throughout the years
of silence,
still to descend,
still to traverse the several spheres
they fall;
and falling at last, and like a lovely rain
upon the soil,
which hitherto had lain
fallow and languishing the while,
they realize
the myriad forms that are their destinies:
strange plants proliferate
and in delight, bending their quivering leaves
unto the light
from whence all things originate,
they fertilize
the future with their memories:
strange plants proliferate
and in delight;
for all of this is light and I am light.
But in the sea,
which hitherto was void,
crustaceans, shunning all society,
invent their shells: they are afraid
to greet the world
in its immensity;
and thus arrayed,
like to the hermit in his citadel,
whose life is measured in his beads,
they are employed
in making manifest the hidden pearl
that all their substance breeds;
and in the sea,
mute fish, to breathe, invent their gills:
the same bequeath unto their progeny
the light that fills
their substance in the sea;
for all of this is as it needs must be.
At length amphibians transitional,
transforming and transformed,
begin to crawl
upon the land, where insects swarmed
at large; and where, as uncontested lords,
ancestral moths and dragonflies
mating in hordes
were wont to populate the burgeoning trees
throughout the Silurian Age:
amphibians unconscious of the states
through which they change
to higher vertebrates,
and after a billion years begin to crawl
upon the land—
amphibians transitional,
transforming and
transformed by hidden laws;
for all of this enacts an unknown cause.
And reptiles then and dinosaurs appear
upon the land and in the sea
and in the air;
and they exact the tyranny
of those to whom all lesser forms succumb:
they feed on what they were
as they become
themselves what they were wont to fear
when still they stood in dread
of what they are:
Tyrannosaurus rears his awesome head
and gathers up and rends
his anguished prey between his jaws;
Triceratops, whose armored spine defends
him from his foes,
belike unto a knight encased in mail,
suspends a lance between his eyes—
to no avail
against the imminent demise
his warlike shape portends;
Pteranodon,
upon whose fate depends
the fate of birds as yet unknown,
shall not forbear to spread his leather wings;
and though to soar
beyond the state of things
is loss of self, shall not forbear to ascend.
All these and many more
predominate
until the late Triassic shapes their end,
and lacking form to mediate,
negates itself in order to transcend:
but Plesiosaur,
who makes his back a sail,
shall float upborne upon the wind
until at last he turn into a whale;
and Stegyosaur,
whose brain is in his tail—
all these, and many more of these, prevail.
But mammals meanwhile
in obscurity,
while dinosaur and reptile
hold hegemony,
and while the stars forbid them and the clime
is temperate or torrid,
bide their time:
they bide their time; and when their much abhorrèd
enemies decline—
for lacking the wherewithal to have withstood
the bitter cold, their limbs gangrene
and freeze in their own blood—
these mammals then
assume their destinies;
but how and when
they form, discrete through continuities,
and how they soon disperse
through all the world; how quantities
form qualities, travers-
ing the antinomies—no eye can scan,
no tongue spin out in verse;
or how they span
the compass of vicissitudes,
through all of which they flourish in their plenitudes.
There is a river,
broad in its expanse
and swift in its career: the tern and skimmer
sojourn here, and fish dance
brightly in its shoals and glide
the summer long:
upon the banks beside,
patrols of purple flowers throng;
the ounce and libbard play among
the rushes in the tranquil afternoon,
and at the eventide
descend to slake their thirst: the moon
illuminates the stream and is the guide
of sundry beasts of diverse kinds:
great tawny lions, bears, and spotted hinds—
as through the heart of Africa it winds.
Here lemurs hang
upon the leafy boughs,
the oldest primates, as they used to do
when first sprang
mutants which, though chance endows,
the self-subsisting positive flows through—
and flows through all
that all things still should live,
nor by the force of entropy be hurled:
the self-subsisting positive,
whose inorganic through the organic world
by natural selection
still unfolds
the process of perfection
as manifolds through higher manifolds,
till conscious intellection,
no longer passive, for itself shall strive:
the self-subsisting positive,
whose law is progress and through progress to survive.
And here sweet music from the holy
spring
pulses forever through their arteries,
as from these mutants, slowly
mutating,
a nation of philosophers arise,
lovers of wisdom whom
the centuries,
through all their journeys from
that distant sphere,
foretell in certain harmonies,
which is the music that these mutants hear,
lovers of wisdom,
music, poetry,
by whom and in whom
nature is complete
and what had been abstract is made concrete. . . .
(AN EMBEDDED FUGUE)
(First Voice)
It is a fugue that hovers in the air—
all things are ordered in its harmony:
(Second Voice)
I hear that music, but I also hear
chaos, confusion, and cacophony:
The
voices rise and fall, distinct and clear
like many rivers running to the sea—
the sounds of desolation and despair
of those who are afraid that they must die:
where none
are lost or languishing, and none
are swallowed
up in its immensity;
that they must die before they have begun
to realize the myriad destinies
but all
are met in one, and yet each one
retains
its own unique identity
that had been promised to them by the sun
which now glints bleakly from a covered sky.
. . . and here sweet music from the holy
spring
pulses forever through their arteries,
as from these mutants, slowly
mutating,
a nation of philosophers arise . . .
I come from a star
whose life is light, whose light the years
send forth; whose emanations, radiant, are
the realization of the earth . . .
The moon shone, and so the stars
beat down from their chambers of gold.
Where have you come, unknown to us before?
and where is the world?
***
Copyright © 2004 by Henry Weinfield.
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