The rest of our hour we'll spend doing some passages
from "Sandover."
This very long poem is based on communications with the Ouija
board, over the Ouija board.
For nearly 25 years David Jackson and I
held these seances whether at home in Connecticut
or in that house in Athens I wrote about and after the fire.
Using a handmade board covered with alphabet,
Arabic numerals, few punctuation marks,
and with an overturned teacup for a pointer,
we came to be in touch with a whole universe whose voices
ranged from those of dead friends and strangers
to fallen angels or subatomic particles
on to God, biology, and his twin sister,
to Queen of Heaven, also known as Psyche or Nature or Chaos.
In volume three of the trilogy, our principal instructors
are the four elemental angels.
We have the archangel Michael, the angel of light and air;
Gabriel, angel of fire or antimatter;
Emmanuel, water; Raphael, of Earth.
These angels have earlier described themselves
as the senses of God.
Michael would therefore be the sight of God,
Gabriel the taste, Emmanuel the touch, Raphael the hearing.
The sense of smell, along with the very breath of life,
is, as we will discover in the passage you'll hear,
the province of nature herself.
There are furthermore a bat who turns
into a peacock and a unicorn left over
from the cataclysm of Atlantis to whom
we have given the name Unice.
These two seem to personify what the physicists call
the weak and the strong force.
I've had a unicorn in mind since a poem from my very
first book, a little sonnet that I'll read to you.
The unicorn here is much more of a literary construction
than Unice is in "Sandover," owing a good deal,
I would say, to Rilke and to the white stag in Flaubert's story
about St. Julian.
But here's the first appearance of that motif.
Hunters choke the golden clearing with apertures:
eye, nostril, ear, for there candor prances, unicorn rare,
whose hooves since dawn was steering the whole hunt
toward beatitude.
Yet when to pouring horns his captors,
nearing the mound where he should stand subdued,
find once more the shining puzzle they stalk
is constantly disappearing beyond the hounds and musket
muzzles.
How shall they think that, fearing he might too blissfully
amaze, the white stag leaps unseen into their gaze,
into their empty horns, past hearing?