Two Poems by Robert B. Shaw
Poetry Nation 1 Number 1, 1973
Winter Vision
Pushing your way through
the city's winter,
trudging above the subway's
hardened arteries,
breasting stymied ranks
of traffic, you might catch
a quick, zeroing glimpse
of how things will stand
at the ultimate freeze:
dogs and their leash-bearers
halted in mid-procession,
feathers of steam
poking iced from their lips;
a newspaper page
caught sailing aloft,
shellacked, spreadeagled,
a late bulletin;
a few snow crystals
sprinkled off a high cornice,
hung in space a few feet
above the ground;
and you yourself shouldering
against the stiffening
air, pressing up to that
heaviest glass door
without a handle,
without a hinge.
And you too will soon
assume a final posture,
monumental
beyond your expectations.
The afternoon sun,
so unaccountably
out of heat, will locate
all in a whitening glare,
a far off lens
edging into focus
everything, everything
at long last.
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Museum Coins
Money must once have seemed
innocent, original,
a miracle mined and minted.
Men thought (some thought)
that gold ripened underground,
responding to a generous, piercing
influence of the sun.
No numismatist myself,
the shimmer of these enticed me
to blink over their display case,
conning the profiles that so
commandingly adorn their discs.
A score of our stodgy Miss
Liberties have tried
and failed to emulate them:
Athena, Alexander,
helmed gods and men,
heroic heads the race
in its youth relied on.
But what, I wonder, put it
into my head to wonder
which of the little, dimmer ones
was the obolus, the smaller-
than-bite-sized coin the bereaved
put under the tongue of a corpse
to pay the Ferryman?
Failure to pay meant a hundred years'
walk in the thorny woods.
Later, alone on a cool
marble bench in the lobby,
I held a dime to my lips
and tasted nothing more than a faint
flavor of use and abuse.
Children, of course, are always
swallowing coins, which seems less
silly somehow than tasting them.
I took my dime out of my mouth
and myself out of that museum,
onto a street where the August sun
poured forth an argosy.
To be born, to be brought up on earth
is so untold a good fortune,
it is like found money,
stumbled on every day.
What we conceive as our last
destination is our own business.
Let each man look to his own,
I say to quiet my heart
that would have me blurting out
what few of my friends believe:
We go where Love would have us go,
the ferrying there is free.
These poems are taken from Poetry Nation Number 1, 1973, the first ever issue of the magazine we published. The whole archive since then is available to paying subscribers.