Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BLUES FOR JIMMY, by THOMAS MCGRATH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

BLUES FOR JIMMY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: If it were evening on a dead man's watch
Last Line: Locked on my wrist to remember us by
Subject(s): Brothers; Death; Soldiers; War; World War Ii; Half-brothers; Dead, The; Second World War


1.

(If it were evening on a dead man's watch,
Flowerfall, sundown, the light furled on the pane;
And the shutters going up on the windows of the twentieth century,
6 Post Mortem in the world of the dead --)

The train was late. We waited among the others,
All of us waiting for friends on the late train.
Meanwhile the usual darkness, the usual stars,
Allies of the light trust and homeless lovers.
And then the train with its clanking mechanical fury.
"Our will could neither turn it around nor stop it."
Abrupt as history it violates the station --
The knife, the dream, the contemporary terror.

(Midnight awakens on a dead man's watch:
The two exact figures in the million beds
Embrace like skeletons chained in other dreams,
In the world of the dead where love has no dominion.)

"And then we took him to the funeral parlor,
Half-way house, after the train came in."
We found he had put on another face,
The indifferent face of death, its brutality and pallor.
"And now at last, everyone is home?"
All but you, brother. We left you there alone.

(The dead man's watch unlocks the naked morning,
And the day, already bandaging victories and wounds,
Assumes like Time the absolute stance of indifference,
On yesterday's sorrow setting its actual seal.)

Among the absorbing tenants of god's half-acre
We gave you back into the mundane chemistry.
The banker dug the grave, but the grave and gentle
Were part of the common plot. The priestly succor,
Scattering platitudes like wreaths of wilted flowers,
Drove in the coffin nails with god's own little hammer --
You are stapled still; and we are freed of onus.
Brother, te laudamus, hallowed be our shame.

(The shadow of noon -- upon a dead man's watch --
Falls on the hours and mysteries; April, October
Darkening, and the forward and following centuries. The blind flyer
Locates himself on the map by that cone of silence.)

2.

Locates himself by that cone of silence,
But does not establish his private valence:
When the long grey hearse goes down the street
The driver is masked and his eyes are shut --
While confessing the dead man is his brother,
Only in dreams will admit the murder,
Accepting then what is always felt:
The massive implacable personal guilt.

Who refuses to be his brother's keeper
Must carry a knife and never sleep,
Defending himself at whatever cost
Against that blind importunate ghost.
Priest, banker, teacher or publican,
The mask of the irresponsible man
May hide from the masker his crimes of passion
But not the sin of his class position.

And what of the simple sensual man
Who only wants to be let alone,
With his horse and his hound and his house so fine,
A car and a girl and a voting machine?
Innocent Mr. and Mrs. Onan
Are dead before they have time to lie down.
The doorbell rings but they are away.
It is better to murder than deny.

The desperate laws of human motion
Deny innocence but permit salvation;
If we accept sentence before we are tried
We discover the crime our guilt had hid.
But the bourgeois, the saint, the two-gun man,
Who close the gates upon their dream,
Refuse to discover that of salvation
There is no private accumulation.

3.

The wind dies in the evening. Dust in the chill air
Settles in thin strata, taking the light with it,
Dusk before dusk in the river hollows.
And westward light glamors the wide Missouri,
The foothills, the Rockies, the arc of the harping coast.
And then the brooding continental night.

When I was a child the long evenings of midsummer
Died slow and splendid on my bedroom windowpane,
And I went into sleep's magnetic landscape
With no fear of awakening in a country of nightmares.

It was easy then. You could let the light go --
Tomorrow was another day and days were all the same:
Pictures in a book you'd read, segments of sealed and certain time:
Easy to go back to the day before yesterday, the year before last.

But now it is impossible. The leaf is there, and the light,
Fixed in the photograph, but the happiness is lost in the album,
And your words are lost in the mind, and your voice in the years,
And your letters' improbable tongues trouble the attic darkness.

And this is the true nature of grief and the human condition:
That you are nowhere; that you are nowhere, nowhere,
Nowhere on the round earth, and nowhere in time,
And the days like doors close between us, lock us forever apart.

4.

Not where spring with its discontinued annuities
Fills birds' nests with watches, dyes the winds yellow,
Scatters on the night its little flowers of disenchantment
And a drunken alphabet like the memory of clocks.

Not where summer, at the mercury's Feast of Ascension,
Deploys in fields the scarecrows of remembrance;
Summer with the wheat, oil, bread, birth, honey and barley,
And a hypnotised regiment of weeping butterflies.

Not when fall reopens private wounds
To stain the leaves and split the stones in walls;
Opening the doors on the furniture of false enigmas
And a mechanical patter of crazy magicians.

Not when winter on the buried leaf
Erects its barricades of coal stoves and forgetfulness;
With the warmth indoors, talk, love, camaraderie,
And outside a blizzard of years and corpses.

The calendar dies upon a dead man's watch. He is nowhere,
Nowhere in time. And yet must be in Time.
And when the Fifth Season with its mass and personal ascensions --
Fire-birds rising from the burning towns of Negation
Orbit toward freedom --
Until then, brother, I will keep your watch.

5.

I will not deny you through grief,
Nor in the masks and horrors of the voodoo man
Nor sell you in a mass for the dead
Nor seven out and forget you
Nor evict your spirit with a charming rune.
Nor wear my guilt for a badge like a saint or a bourgeois poet.

I forgive myself of your death: Blind shadow of my necessity --
Per mea culpa -- cast by a son of freedom
I climb the hill of your absolute rebellion.
I do not exorcise you: you walk through the dark wood before me.

Though I give your loves to the hours,
Your bones to the first four seasons
Your hope to the ironies
Your eyes to the hawks of heaven
Your blood is made part of the general-strike fund
Your courage is coined into the Revolution
Your spirit informs the winds of the Fifth Season.

Only the tick of a watch divides us.
The crime is to deny the union of opposites.
I make your death my watch, a coin of love and anger,
With your death on one side and mine on the other.
Locked on my wrist to remember us by.


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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