The last two poems that I want to read
are quite different from anything
that I've read until now.
And they are a whole different kind of a poem altogether.
Each of them.
I don't know whether to say too much or too little
is better about them.
The first of them anyway is a kind of poem
that critics love to hold up and wave
and say it's a dramatic monologue.
It's not.
There's a central figure in it and the poem it's--
that central figure in some respect becoming articulate
rather than speaking.
The poem is a kind of verbal emanation from this person
and it doesn't have the grammar of it,
is not the grammar of dramatic and logical and ostensibly
rational speech.
The figure in it is the New Testament figure of Pilate
but it's also every one of us.
And what he's speaking about is in a moral as well as
a linguistic sense language.
What one says.
Where one is and what is said to one, what the world says.
And that's a betrayal of the poem
because it's a crass oversimplification of what
he's really talking about.
But I'm giving you some kind of clue
so that you're not lost by the strangeness of the poem,
I hope.
"Pilate."
It has a life of its own, however
long it served pharaoh, and so a heaven of its own
to which its own blood calls which
should be heard with respect when they call crucify,
crucify him of its own.
Why should you not see it unless it is walking arm
and arm with objects which you think you can see without it.
When low empire itself is not visible.
And a future of its own, the prophecy
is waking without names and strange lands
on unborn tongues those syllables resurrected,
staring is that heaven?
All the pain to find its hands again old.
But you must not suppose that because of the centurions'
reports, eclipses on frontiers and the beards
they are blowing through wooden fences dead men.
But there are no flies in that wind crying sand only.
The long arrows and the kissing arrows
through which his wife coming with her spillage of dreams
because of this man.
But it is the broken windows that look to the future.
And empire is the viewing is different.
So a dream itself.
And how can a man voyage on more than one
bark, one trireme, one skiff with one ore at one time,
even after the washing is heard on that shore and the one oar.
And you should not imagine either that you yourselves
are later or far or otherwise else above all those tongues,
tongues lit at the top of arms under the lungless banners.
The dread in amber, the silence rolling on before the shadows,
burning on the walls with dark cries.
Or going home a long way back through the baths.
The gowns dripping, the feet growing barer,
and the dark flights vanishing into the cracks in the day.
It is termed an alien judgment.
They are like that and can force then
be held accountable that has no life of its own, the dark wine,
dark throats, the call.
The call that hangs in the banners
until it falls as shall the banners fall.
From the walls, the walls from the sky.
Its smoke, its eagles, what was I put here to change?
I was not put here to change.
Could I change myself, my hands and their dreams
a life of their own with its own heaven, own future,
own windows, washing?
Can I change what they do before I am born
for they will do it without me.
Arm in arm with objects.
But lo myself is not visible to this, this man,
the life of its own without me.
Its smoke, its eagles, and wooden fences.
And tonight the hands in the outer circles of the soldiers
corner fires later than the last meal,
gesturing at the reeling night, washing in darkness afterwards
will go home and the darkness will let itself down
into their prayers.