WEBVTT

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The last two poems
that I want to read

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are quite different
from anything

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that I've read until now.

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And they are a whole different
kind of a poem altogether.

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Each of them.

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I don't know whether to
say too much or too little

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is better about them.

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The first of them
anyway is a kind of poem

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that critics love
to hold up and wave

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and say it's a
dramatic monologue.

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It's not.

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There's a central figure
in it and the poem it's--

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that central figure in some
respect becoming articulate

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rather than speaking.

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The poem is a kind of verbal
emanation from this person

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and it doesn't have
the grammar of it,

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is not the grammar of dramatic
and logical and ostensibly

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rational speech.

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The figure in it is the New
Testament figure of Pilate

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but it's also every one of us.

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And what he's speaking about
is in a moral as well as

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a linguistic sense language.

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What one says.

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Where one is and what is said
to one, what the world says.

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And that's a
betrayal of the poem

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because it's a crass
oversimplification of what

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he's really talking about.

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But I'm giving you
some kind of clue

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so that you're not lost by
the strangeness of the poem,

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I hope.

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"Pilate."

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It has a life of
its own, however

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long it served pharaoh,
and so a heaven of its own

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to which its own
blood calls which

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should be heard with respect
when they call crucify,

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crucify him of its own.

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Why should you not see it
unless it is walking arm

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and arm with objects which you
think you can see without it.

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When low empire
itself is not visible.

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And a future of its
own, the prophecy

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is waking without
names and strange lands

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on unborn tongues those
syllables resurrected,

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staring is that heaven?

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All the pain to find
its hands again old.

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But you must not suppose that
because of the centurions'

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reports, eclipses on
frontiers and the beards

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they are blowing through
wooden fences dead men.

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But there are no flies in
that wind crying sand only.

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The long arrows and
the kissing arrows

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through which his wife coming
with her spillage of dreams

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because of this man.

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But it is the broken windows
that look to the future.

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And empire is the
viewing is different.

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So a dream itself.

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And how can a man
voyage on more than one

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bark, one trireme, one skiff
with one ore at one time,

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even after the washing is heard
on that shore and the one oar.

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And you should not imagine
either that you yourselves

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are later or far or otherwise
else above all those tongues,

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tongues lit at the top of arms
under the lungless banners.

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The dread in amber, the silence
rolling on before the shadows,

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burning on the walls
with dark cries.

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Or going home a long way
back through the baths.

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The gowns dripping,
the feet growing barer,

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and the dark flights vanishing
into the cracks in the day.

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It is termed an alien judgment.

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They are like that
and can force then

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be held accountable that has no
life of its own, the dark wine,

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dark throats, the call.

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The call that hangs
in the banners

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until it falls as
shall the banners fall.

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From the walls, the
walls from the sky.

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Its smoke, its eagles, what
was I put here to change?

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I was not put here to change.

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Could I change myself,
my hands and their dreams

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a life of their own with
its own heaven, own future,

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own windows, washing?

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Can I change what they
do before I am born

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for they will do it without me.

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Arm in arm with objects.

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But lo myself is not
visible to this, this man,

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the life of its own without me.

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Its smoke, its eagles,
and wooden fences.

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And tonight the hands in the
outer circles of the soldiers

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corner fires later
than the last meal,

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gesturing at the reeling night,
washing in darkness afterwards

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will go home and the
darkness will let itself down

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into their prayers.

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