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TRIO FOR TWO VOICES AND A WOODWIND
- Wesleyan University Press
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TRIO FOR TWO VOICES AND A WOODWIND You for whom the waters of no spring are sweet: Consider, in their respective empires, vegetal and animal, Men and trees, bearers of the sceptre. Laughing, our leafy Caesar might shrug, "A pusillanimous cousin!" (as we would refer To a ring-tailed monkey or an indiscreet baboon)Or , "an oversized, ambulatory mandrake," Or better, "a carrot, defective, cloven." Man, however, must sooner or later lecture: "A tree is a river system, Continental, a lovely schema against a background Of sky brightness and earth green and brownness: Tiny dark runnels, myriad yet distinct, starting up there in the light, Becoming rivulets, always traveling inward as if drawn by hunger, Becoming brooks, creeks, tributary rivers, And the one great river flowing into a planet. The tree is the antecedent symbolism. A man must always be part of the tree of the living; A tree, of no man, of itself only. What, tell me, feeds on pure air and energy? And what, as in the beginning, on the bitter fruit of a tree?" Excellently done, Professor.And you whose tears drip poison into the well: No longer will you be restless when the belief they offer you- [37] As, under the very noses of the archangels, The oldest story has secretly winked itHas a tree as its god or prophet. The animals with nimble forefeet, hitherto the only voluble observers, Have long been biased. There are no bears, swans or heroes among the constellations Only , throughout all space, branches budded with fire, From which, in an ether where never a wind shivers, Sift and sink the burning flower-flakes of time (Breathgiver, incendiary, refiner of the sorrowful metal That rises, walks and sings like a man; Whitener, when the flakes are ashes, Of philosophical skulls in a valley.) [38] ...