At the Indian Killer's Grave by Robert Lowell Robert Lowell At the Indian Killer's Grave "Here, also, are the veterans of King Philip's War, who burned villages and slaughtered young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them with prayer." -- Hawthorne Behind King's Chapel what the earth has kept Whole from the jerking noose of time extends Its dark enigma to Jehoshaphat; Or will King Philip plait The just man's scalp in the wailing valley! Friends, Blacker than these black stones the subway bends About the dirty elm roots and the well For the unchristened infants in the waste Of the great garden rotten to its root; Death, the engraver, puts forward his bone foot And Grace-with-wings and Time-on-wings compel All this antique abandon of the disgraced To face Jehovah's buffets and his ends. The dusty leaves and frizzled lilacs gear This garden of the elders with baroque And prodigal embellishments but smoke, Settling upon the pilgrims and their grounds, Espouses and confounds Their dust with the off-scourings of the town; The libertarian crown Of England built their mausoleum. Here A clutter of Bible and weeping willows guards The stern Colonial magistrates and wards Of Charles the Second, and the clouds Weep on the just and unjust as they will -- For the poor dead cannot see Easter crowds On Boston Common or the Beacon Hill Where strangers hold the golden Statehouse dome For good and always. Where they live is home: A common with an iron railing: here Frayed cables wreathe the spreading cenotaph Of John and Mary Winslow and the laugh Of Death is hacked in sandstone, in their year. A green train grinds along its buried tracks And screeches. When the great mutation racks The Pilgrim Father's relics, will these plaques Harness the spare-ribbed persons of the dead To battle with the dragon? Philip's head Grins on the platter, fouls in pantomime The fingers of kept time: "Surely, this people is but grass," He whispers, "this will pass; But, Sirs, the trollop dances on your skulls And breaks the hollow noddle like an egg That thought the world an eggshell. Sirs, the gulls Scream from the squelching wharf-piles, beg a leg To crack their crops. The Judgment is at hand; Only the dead are poorer in this world Where State and elders thundered race, hurled Anathemas at nature and the land That fed the hunter's gashed and green perfection-- Its settled mass concedes no outlets for your puns And verbal Paradises. Your election, Hawking above this slime For souls as single as their skeletons, Flutters and claws in the dead hand of time." When you go down this man-hole to the drains, The doorman barricades you in and out; You wait upon his pleasure. All about The pale, sand-colored, treeless chains Of T-squared buildings strain To curb the spreading of the braced terrain; When you go down this hole, perhaps your pains Will be rewarded well; no rough-cast house Will bed and board you in King's Chapel. Here A public servant putters with a knife And paints the railing red Forever, as a mouse Cracks walnuts by the headstones of the dead Whose chiseled angels peer At you, as if their art were long as life. I ponder on the railing at this park: Who was the man who sowed the dragon's teeth, That fabulous or fancied patriarch Who sowed so ill for his descent, beneath King's Chapel in this underworld and dark? John, Matthew, Luke and Mark, Gospel me to the Garden, let me come Where Mary twists the warlock with her flowers-- Her soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers And her whole body an ecstatic womb, As through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom. http://www.certando.net/vali/lowell.htm