Pale Fire Part 2

"Yes, that's okay." Gripping the stang, she peered 460 At ghostly trees. Bus stopped. Bus disappeared.

Thunder above the Jungle. "No, not that!"

Pat Pink, our guest (antiatomic chat).

Eleven struck. You sighed. "Well, I'm afraid There's nothing else of interest." You played Network roulette: the dial turned and trk'ed.

Commercials were beheaded. Faces flicked.

An open mouth in midsong was struck out.

An imbecile with sideburns was about To use his gun, but you were much too quick.

470 A jovial Negro raised his trumpet. Trk.

Your ruby ring made life and laid the law.

Oh, switch it off! And as life snapped we saw A pinhead light dwindle and die in black Infinity.

Out of his lakeside shack A watchman, Father Time, all gray and bent, Emerged with his uneasy dog and went Along the reedy bank. He came too late.

You gently yawned and stacked away your plate.

We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw 480 Twigs at the windowpane. Phone ringing? No.

I helped you with the dishes. The tall clock Kept on demolis.h.i.+ng young root, old rock.

"Midnight," you said. What's midnight to the young?

And suddenly a festive blaze was flung Across five cedar trunks, snowpatches showed, And a patrol car on our b.u.mpy road Came to a crunching stop. Retake, retake!

People have thought she tried to cross the lake At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed 490 From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.

Others supposed she might have lost her way By turning left from Bridgeroad; and some say She took her poor young life. I know. You know.

It was a night of thaw, a night of blow, With great excitement in the air. Black spring Stood just around the corner, s.h.i.+vering In the wet starlight and on the wet ground.

The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned.

A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank 500 Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.

Canto Three.

L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais: The grand potato.

I.P.H., a lay Inst.i.tute (I) of Preparation (P) For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we Called it - big if! - engaged me for one term To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"

Wrote President McAber).

You and I, And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye To Yewshade, in another, higher state.

510 I love great mountains. From the iron gate Of the ramshackle house we rented there One saw a snowy form, so far, so fair, That one could only fetch a sigh, as if It might a.s.sist a.s.similation.

Iph Was a larvorium and a violet: A grave in Reason's early spring. And yet It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed What mostly interests the preterist; For we die every day; oblivion thrives 520 Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.

I'm ready to become a floweret Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.

And I'll turn down eternity unless The melancholy and the tenderness Of mortal life; the pa.s.sion and the pain; The claret taillight of that dwindling plane Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay 530 On running out of cigarettes; the way You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme, This index card, this slender rubber band Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, Are found in Heaven by the newlydead Stored in its strongholds through the years.

Instead The Inst.i.tute a.s.sumed it might be wise Not to expect too much of paradise: What if there's n.o.body to say hullo To the newcomer, no reception, no 540 Indoctrination? What if you are tossed Into a boundless void, your bearings lost, Your spirit stripped and utterly alone, Your task unfinished, your despair unknown, Your body just beginning to putresce, A non-undresssable in morning dress, Your widow lying p.r.o.ne on a dim bed, Herself a blur in your dissolving head!

While snubbing G.o.ds, including the big G, 550 Iph borrowed some peripheral debris From mystic visions; and it offered tips (The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) - How not to panic when you're made a ghost:, Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast, Meet solid bodies and glissade right through, Or let a person circulate through you.

How to locate in blackness, with a gasp, Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.

How to keep sane in spiral types of s.p.a.ce.

560 Precautions to be taken in the case Of freak reincarnation: what to do On suddenly discovering that you Are now a young and vulnerable toad Plump in the middle of a busy road, Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine, Or a book mite in a revived divine.

Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment. We give advice 570 To widower. He has been married twice: He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both Jealous of one another. Time means growth.

And growth means nothing in Elysian life.

Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond Full of a dreamy sky. And, also blond, But with a touch of tawny in the shade, Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone bal.u.s.trade The other sits and raises a moist gaze 580 Toward the blue impenetrable haze.

How to begin? Which first to kiss? What toy To give the babe? Does that small solemn boy Know of the head-on crash which on a wild March night killed both the mother and the child?

And she, the second love, with instep bare In ballerina black, why does she wear The earrings from the other's jewel case?

And why does she avert her fierce young face?

For as we know from dreams it is so hard 590 To speak to our dear dead! They disregard Our apprehension, queaziness and shame - The awful sense that they're not quite the same.

And our school chum killed in a distant war Is not surprised to see us at his door.

And in a blend of jauntiness and gloom Points at the puddles in his bas.e.m.e.nt room.

But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-call When morning finds us marching to the wall Under the stage direction of some goon 600 Political, some uniformed baboon?

We'll think of matters only known to us - Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus; Listen to distant c.o.c.ks crow, and discern Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern; And while our royal hands are being tied, Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride The dedicated imbeciles, and spit Into their eyes just for the fun of it.

Nor can one help the exile, the old man 610 Dying in a motel, with the loud fan Revolving in the torrid prairie night And, from the outside, bits of colored light Reaching his bed like dark hands from the past He suffocates and conjures in two tongues The nebulae dilating in his lungs.

A wrench, a rift - that's all one can foresee.

Maybe one finds le grand neant; maybe Again one spirals from the tuber's eye.

620 As you remarked the last time we went by The Inst.i.tute: "I really could not tell The differences between this place and h.e.l.l."

We heard cremationists guffaw and snort At Grabermann's denouncing the Retort As detrimental to the birth of wraiths.

We all avoided criticizing faiths.

The great Starover Blue reviewed the role Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.

The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese 630 Discanted on the etiquette at teas With ancestors, and how far up to go.

I tore apart the fantasies of Poe, And dealt with childhood memories of strange Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range.

Among our auditors were a young priest And an old Communist. Iph could at least Compete with churches and the party line.

In later years it started to decline: Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in 640 Pale jellies and a floating mandolin.

Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept All is allowed, into some cla.s.ses crept; And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb, A school of Freudians headed for the tomb.

That tasteless venture helped me in a way.

I learnt what to ignore in my survey Of death's abyss. And when we lost our child I knew there would be nothing: no self-styled Spirit would touch a keyboard of dry wood 650 To rap out her pet name; no phantom would Rise gracefully to welcome you and me In the dark garden, near the s.h.a.gbark tree.

"What is that funny creaking - do you hear?"

"It is the shutter on the stairs, my dear."

"If you're not sleeping, let's turn on the light.

I hate that wind! Let's play some chess." "All right."

"I'm sure it's not the shutter. There - again."

"It is a tendril fingering the pane."

"What glided down the roof and made that thud?"

660 "It is old winter tumbling in the mud."

"And now what shall I do? My knight is pinned."

Who rides so late in the night and the wind?

It is the writer's grief. It is the wild March wind. It is the father with his child.

Later came minutes, hours, whole days at last, when she'd be absent from our thoughts, so fast Did life, the woolly caterpillar run.

We went to Italy. Sprawled in the sun.

On a white beach with other pink or brown 670 Americans. Flew back to our small town.

Found that my bunch of essays The Untamed Seahorse was "universally acclaimed"

(It sold three hundred copies in one year).

Again school started, and on hillsides, where Wound distant roads, one saw the steady stream Of carlights all returning to the dream Of college education. You went on Translating into French Marvell and Donne.

It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane 680 Lolita Swept from Florida to Maine.

Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.

Lang made your portrait. And one night I died.

The Crashaw Club had paid me to discuss Why Poetry Is Meaningful to Us.

I gave my sermon, a dull thing but short.

As I was leaving in some haste, to thwart The so-called "question period" at the end, One of those peevish people who attend Such talks only to say they disagree 690 Stood up and pointed with his pipe at me.

And then it happened - the attack, the trance, Or one of my old fits. There sat by chance A doctor in the front row. At his feet Patly I fell. My heart had stopped to beat, It seems, and several moments pa.s.sed before It heaved and went on trudging to a more Conclusive destination. Give me now Your full attention.

I can't tell you how I knew - but I did know that I had crossed 700 The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret.

A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

I realized, of course, that it was made Not of our atoms; that the sense behind 710 The scene was not our sense. In life, the mind Of any man is quick to recognize Natural shams, and then before his eyes The reed becomes a bird, the k.n.o.bby twig An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big Wickedly folded moth. But in the case Of my white fountain what it did replace Perceptually was something that, I felt, Could be grasped only by whoever dwelt In the strange world where I was a mere stray.

720 And presently I saw it melt away: Though still unconscious I was back on earth.

The tale I told provoked my doctor's mirth.

He doubted very much that in the state He found me in "one could hallucinate Or dream in any sense. Later, perhaps, But not during the actual collapse.

No, Mr. Shade."

But, Doctor, I was dead!

He smiled. "Not quite: just half a shade," he said.

However, I demurred. In mind I kept Replaying the whole thing. Again I stepped 730 Down from the platform, and felt strange and hot, And saw that chap stand up, and toppled, not Because a heckler pointed with his pipe, But probably because the time was ripe For just that b.u.mp and wobble on the part Of a limp blimp, an old unstable heart.

My vision reeked with truth. It had the tone, The quiddity and quaintness of its own Reality. It was. As time went on.

740 Its constant vertical in triumph shone.

Often when troubled by the outer glare Of street and strife, inward I'd turn, and there, There in the background of my soul it stood, Old Faithful! And its presence always would Console me wonderfully. Then, one day, I came across what seemed a twin display.

It was a story in a magazine About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.