Classic Poem

Lifting a hammer, shoe-
deep in the fallen heraldries
of hard- and silver-maple leaves,
sun-yellow and vermillion three-
pronged pennons, blazons,
and quarterings all jumbled on-
to the green turf — a great
host overthrown — I feel
like Charles Martel
among the Frankish dead:
the colors, the clumsy cleaving steel
of the wedge, the ravelling woods. . . .
Martel defends again — from the north
this time — breaking the backs
of logs that, like the paynim, are
brands-for-the-burning.

But it takes the heart
out of hammering, all this
splendor second after second
falling on all sides. It's like seeing
a cinema speedup of historic time —
in one day what a millennium
of moths do to the panoplies of Arras;
or, in one blizzard
of red rags, all the fallen
of all the wars of the world. The sledge
weighs half a ton when I call back
my own heraldic days — a child
dreaming over some scarlet-bloused
toy grenadiers; boy, galloping
in the gaudy lists of high-school
ball games among flags and bands;
soldier, mounted among the last
(aerial) squadrons whose insignia
stood a yard high and whose squares held
till shot apart. . . .

Once, hunched in a bubble of noise
and faint fluorescence, over beaconless
country at night, black
as the bottom of the mind, I saw
one solitary light totter
slowly aft underneath — some farmhouse
hundreds of miles from any named city.
Now it is I
who, from the black well of the nights, look up
at aircraft passing, their winglights
walking across the stars. My star
was an ignis fatuus of the solitudes. . . .

Solitude, that's the last device:
" Man rampant upon a field
with hammer. " But this figure too
the moth riddles. Through thinned leaves
you can see more clearly now the wet-
built cantilevered clapboard houses
going up on the tops of ridges
roundabout. They are flyspecking
our last antique grandeur, the hills'.
And, overhead, thunderers-beyond-sound,
trailing long cons and shock waves,
make the earth shudder
under horses too high,
hammers too terrible
either to join or oppose. The hemisphere
burns in effigy and the carrion crows
cry scandal and blow above the trees
like cinders out of the fire. . . .Solitude
is too well-informed these mornings
not to know all is lost.
Yet it makes a gesture,
this thousand-year-old
stance of the hammerer,
good enough to drive home a point.
And what else matters?