First Cambridge Poem

Graduation Day, Thinking of Byron on the Trinity Backs, Half Moon



Never shall beauty, truth, honor be enough.

But I have taken to walk the dark Backs under the half moon.
He flattens the water.
He gems the long grass.
Whatever color he sheds around him,
it is perceived ice-blue,
as if the imperial moon had warred and won
all the gray spires, all the complicated brickwork.

The youths of Trinity dance by candlelight,
the boys’ voices like a water deeper than the moony Cam,
the girls’ voices like the sudden rising of night birds,
as they never do.
The river listens.
The bridge listens.
They bear all onward, longing to cleave to one place, listening.

The cob and the pen and four sooty cygnets
sleep in the grass beside the river.
They alone look as they always do in the transfiguring night,
for their glamor is with them always, even in sleep.
The cob raises his head to listen. He is still asleep.
He is not listening to us.

I say to whomever’s listening,
“Find a way to bless.
Find a way to uphold.
Find a way to stay.”

So the half moon answers.
It is Byron, boy of Trinity,
in a long arc entering the water
without a sound, without a ripple,
barely breaking the moonlight–
Byron with his body ice-blue in the ice-blue plenum,
the ardors for an hour cooled,
the hot words set aside, stroking in the great cool
and the greater dark,
unheeded in the sleep of swans
I think if I could make this moment stay . . . .
If I could seize the ice-blue trailing silks as they sweep
inexorable across the daiseyed grass . . .

The great swan shifts his feathers in his sleep.

Never shall beauty, truth, and honor be enough.
There must be the waxing half moon,
the even-now-declining laughter,
the tender generation of the swans,
the blue god in the river uttering such words,
weaving together an age and an age--

Blazing, fleeting, gone, imperishable;