Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, NOCTURNE FOR THE TOWN, by ALICE MONKS MEARS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

NOCTURNE FOR THE TOWN, by                    
First Line: Here the heavy shadow of the conspiracy of reason
Last Line: By wonder of wakers looking on the mountain.
Subject(s): Mountain Climbing


Here the heavy shadow of the conspiracy of reason
lies against the base of Imagination's mountain
(rumored treacherous, ice-cragged, unscalable):
rooftops and cone of spire, crenellations
of storefronts, solid school chimneys.

Look on the old system of canals, invisibly in repair,
conducting thought and desire under the willows placidly.
In the clock-tended rhythm, day and season,
all is rehearsed unforgettably, even the variations.

But night eats the shadow, and the mountain
illumined in moonless night troubles watchers,
distant and brilliant with ice edges, peaked silver, cloudless.
Rhythms undyked in darkness move over the arid places,
persuading the wakers to the beat of longings alien
to the small pulse of the town.

The boy's eyes fix on the jagged arrow of the mountain top.
To die on the mountain wall like climbers
clinging above the chasm, mauled by wind, snow-struck,
frozen there like some bird stretched on rock,
a clean death exciting with little people watching
a long way below.
How the old ones rot here like apples in soggy autumn. ...

Revelation was by night when the line
of angel garment seared the dark.
The young preacher at the window sees the mountain
glittering silverly light books, pencils, paper
to petals of dust.

Vision being individual, do not faint in loneliness.
What have the others seen? Comforted with promises.
Starve! Starve! Go to the desert, feed the heart on hunger.
The saints will come up, one by one,
barefooted saints, lean as December trees, dark-rooted, starlit.

Envy of lovers torments the virgin thighs and light fingers
of the girl combing her hair in the dark.
Breathless she watches them in her mind:
weaving hand in hand, unnoticed, nameless, along city streets,
laughing before lighted shop-windows,
slipping into unlit arcades.
Along the sea while night laps on the moon-shore gold:
whisper of eyelash on cheek, the lips on the throat-pulse,
new bodies touching tireless.
Praise of all beds, the leafed and the moonlit
on the lonely hill, the green-shadowed,
the yielding, the clean-sheeted so secretly woven with wind.
beloved ... beloved ... beloved. ...

By day the cycle only is apparent
spoked with like generations, uniform, useful.
Out of the teacher's energy the patterned creation
turns to reproach him, puny against gleaming ledges of mountain.
Still uncut in the block sleeps the new image
heroic, for the sculpturing hand that does not falter
into old lines and the known profile.
Is the stone soft, letting the chisel slide?
Is the unfamiliar face possible?
Hold the image in the mind, uneffaced
by the eye's persuasion to old contours.
Persist, stubborner than inheritance
toward the imagined form, defeating the repetition.

What vault of treasure or interval of passion
at last distracts the inquiring mind —
with ease and peace quieted, so suddenly run through with question?
The man stands tensely by the window
bitten with the clear night,
the mind tracing deception of achievement,
briefly alert to its betrayal.
Half-knowledge of the amazing air assails him:
terror of speeding light, of fierce electron, of sound
traveling by inaudible.
Bitter desire for discovery too late!
From wasteland of pleasant monotony the mind
shaped to adventure more perilous than lured
black northern ships aches for contest to strain and exhaust it.
The hull rots for fathomless waters.

Under the tidal inflowing currents:
the normal breath of the sleeping rises and falls,
resistant, undefeated. More and more forceful
it absorbs the strange rhythms, without mockery
annuls the restless, denies query.
The web of watchers' dreaming breaks with the breath.
In raveling dark recede radiant crags and the peak.
Power is in the sleeping, not overcome
by wonder of wakers looking on the mountain.





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