Crossing Jesus Green


There will not be room for everything.

There will not be room in this life for everything.

There will not be room even to catalog
what there wasn’t room for.

Thank Christ
for envy cut off by the saving
incapacity of imagination,
for “I wish” abbreviated by the
airport timetable, by the drive to work,
by the phone playing its tinny tune, so
irksome you can’t believe you chose it for yourself.

I’m thinking of those people who spent their time,
like me, remembering what was better left behind.
Wordsworth, you piker, gloomy with privilege
at Saint John’s, you waited five years
to get to the guts of Tintern Abbey. Well, son,
it’s been forty since I first crossed Jesus Green
in blue cold under that poetic and unpitying starlight,
which I remember, as one should, as though
it were the scalding moment of this moment,
not in tranquility, not with well proportioned music,
but sharp and harsh and still refusing to come to terms,

ready to admit–at last-- I want to be them,
all of them who had to split and rejoin
with a sigh to get around me in Jesus Green
that night under the bare lime trees,
chatting about French poetry in French,
poling down the river with girls and boys
each prettier, airier than the last–
never mind that green ditch of the Cam
hardly matters beside Ohio, Missouri,
even the stone-troubled, modest and
bear-drunk-from French Broad, my river now,
so oddly unsung. I want to be them
with their ivory skin from generations
of mirthful and half-conscious inbreeding,
the blue blood and the purple and the almost red
stalled in their pools under the dented coronets–
the diagnostic flop of glossy hair,
the vaguely aureate mist, as though
Rupert Brooke, upon death, sublimed into the air
and was distributed unequally
but with an open hand
on all that came behind,

(–me with my umbrella and my two shirts,
fending it off until it’s too late--)

Oh, I want to talk of Schopenhauer
and really give a fuck,
to be able to pronounce “Keynes” and “Lytton”
and “Cholmondeley” without thinking twice,
citing dates fluid as the names of lovers,
walking a little halt for the sake of one’s
six times great grandfather who took a bullet
for the queen God knows where and why,
a colossus in the Abbey testifying to it all.
I want to know how to narrow my lips
and clip the witty syllables when
the Master or the Arch-Deacon or
Whatever His Bleeding Lordship summons me to sherry.

I want to be able to say these things
without that defensive Midwestern irony
in my voice. . . the way you do, longing
and rejecting with one tune twisted on the tongue.

I want to say to my Dorothy from behind my hand,
“Steer clear of this. The effortless perfection of others
will only make you miserable. Take my example instead,
kicking the base of what I build,
lest it soar too high,
lest it leave too dizzyingly behind
that muck out of which it’s born.”

Oh, still, I beheld all sorrowing that first night how I
want to be that beautiful, to walk down the cobbles
with that strut, to halloo to my comrades
with such pulpit pitch of perfect music.

Oh God, this royal city, let it sink into the fen,
whence it came,
lifted on its stone piles,
lifted, and lifted, adding roses around for buoyancy,
adding roses around, and roses,
stretching its stone up to hitch onto the sky.