Thy bare-boned hand fists up, knocks at the fist of thy head
With that same pained, grasping knock of a hand that has bled
Drop to drop out of it all the giblet-nerved blood thick and red
That was in it to drop, with only the mechanical left:
Skulled nerve orders beeping their way down like the dead.
In the grass there was wind—a green wind in the grass.
He had lived in that house four years. For four long, angry, dull years. He had hated it, hated every minute of every day of every month of every year. It had not been his house, neither his life, but theirs, preeminently theirs. Life lived their way. He had lived not his own life at all, but theirs.
Up now peeks the penis slow and careful from his nest, from the curly hair that is sign of the boy matured to man: hair grown curly. Out looks penis from his safe black nest, peeking out. What in the world shall await him?
The clouds were moving across the sky, quick and sudden in their rush.
The water cascaded over his shoulders, down his breast and genitals and down his legs, bouncing upon the rocks off the hooks of his two feet.
And so we are fools, and go about ourselves and our business. But we do not know that through the queer-eyed lamps of our grey night streets, the other world looks out on us. The dark other world, inhabited by dark physical bodies. They hide behind the thick trunks of our trees at night, around the corner-shadows of our buildings, the wet, wrong reflections on our rainy streets. It is the dark physical world looking queerly out on us. At the false gods.
In the USA, our nightmare has been our inability to accept life. To resign ourselves to it. We absolutely refuse provincialism, refuse to be contained. A great desire to know things, and to peer in on it all like wise gods. . . .a consuming desire to know life and not be known, be consumed by life. We want to eat our cake but not have it. We cannot accept being tied down to life. We insist on surmounting it with knowledge and height, the cute conveniences of technology and inactive energy. Can't stand to be weighed down to mere life.
A man is a much more delicate, rare thing than we imagine. So is a woman. Like a shy plant that dares not flower til the season is right. That's how it is with us, with our man or our womanhood side. It only flowers rarely in this mechanical season. Only rarely does it show, and spite the things that are destructive to it, the harsh mental things. But when it does petal out and open, a dark, deep touch is made, a big, deep touch. The woman comes out of her clothes, out of hiding, and the man shows his face and his hands. Suddenly there are his hands looking like the hands of a man, will-free, instinctive, free of forced habit, a bit uncoordinated. And the woman is out of her skin of clothes, fit to be seen in her deep soul, dark like her protective hair. She no more flits around with artificial eagerness and shallow joy, like a dumb blond butterfly, still wrapped in a cocoon of triteness. Her consciousness shifts downward to balance away from the mental edge, into flowered physical awareness. Away from words and wordyness toward a silent figuring, a silent knowledge. The new bodily awareness of the world, untouched, prime and untouched by anything mental. It's the central underground spring of creative mystical awareness.
In coming into touch with the man, they touch this awareness, renew themselves, and at the same time fulfill themselves with a full physical fulfillment.
We see a lot of My Country Right Or Wrong things, but very few My God Right Or Wrong. I wonder why?
(Has Nationalism outstripped Religion?)
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