It’ s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.
The grindstones are turning in Europe’ s windmills.
The wild geese are flying northwards.
Here is the north, here is Stockholm
swimming palaces and hovels.
The logs in the royal fireplace
collapse from Attention to At Ease.
Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,
but the city wells breathe heavily.
Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas
are carried by night over the North Bridge.
An old woodcut of the London Bridge
and a colored lithograph of a barley field.
There are no other pictures on Ward D.
The London Bridge lifts sooty towers above the river.
But it's the barley field I see.
A golden ocean of barley.
It's not like the other grain-fields.
Maybe it's those inward-looking eyes
gone into it so it becomes heaven?
Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies,
over the girl with her first electric, how her high,
thin voice, amplified many times
over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's
in the green grass of the festival site.
Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide
the pistil and the pollen inside.
Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands,
over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées at evening.
It rejoices over Japan, over Korea,
over arts refined over a thousand years —
the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea.
