Poems
The Various Sizes Of The World


We all get used to the regular stars in time.
After the start of learning how far they are,
what distances from earth, and even more
what space they keep apart from star to star,
where centuries divide the closest star's faint light
from light beyond, the mind comes back at last
making the sky seem shallow like the earth
where, from the air, we see a city's lights
spread out across the surface crust below
in constellations we read without surprise.

The sky is a similar surface pierced with lights
until, another morning, the sensitive plate
of a telescope has fixed a light so far
we never knew, so huge that a galaxy needs
to hold it. What address ever really finds
us in the endless depths the world acquires?
The earth has mass to hold our own mass down,
and the huge sun holds earth as though
a whirled cord were taut with it. But the mind
responds to the pull of its own gravities.

The mind is shifted outward into space
beyond the sun, where the surface sky explodes
softly forever like an endless wind.
Out and back the mind, the slide of the rule.
Where shall we add the logarithm of what
to find the actual product of any hour?
What point can fix the decimal of space
that joins the least remoteness of the earth
by tiny increments to the last star?
No, here's an incongruous world, too large, too far.
 

- William Bronk
 

The Building of the Skyscraper

The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
of vertigo.

There are words that mean nothing
But there is something to mean.
Not a declaration which is truth
But a thing
Which is. It is the business of the poet
'To suffer the things of the world
And to speak them and himself out.'

O, the tree, growing from the sidewalk -
It has a little life, sprouting
Little green buds
Into the culture of the streets.
We look back
Three hundred years and see bare land.
And suffer vertigo.
 

- George Oppen
 
from The Tablets
{N.B.: The Tablets are supposed translations of supposedly the oldest stone glyphs ever discovered. Cf. the key for reading the Tablets, below "Tablet XXV."}
TABLET XXV

clearly I'm the swimming animal, the light
song or the dark song + + + + + + + + + + simple . . . . . . . .
when it's hot I'm wet, I don't need to celebrate, to
strike two stones together, alone in this small getting holder house
humbled by distractable eyes, quiet realm . . . . . . . . . . . animal
what happened yesterday? the lettuce drains on the sill
colored liquids going up and down inside me . . . . . . tracks . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . without any time + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
river . . . . . . . . . . . reaching around behind my left shoulder. never mind.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . reaching into the hollow
behind my left shoulder, anything, there might be
water, a wasp, clangor lately, the thickness

{etc.}.

KEY:
. . . . . . . . .      untranslatable
+ + + + + +     missing
(?)                   variant reading
[]                     supplied by the scholar translator.
- Armand Schwerner
                                        {Schwerner continues here}