MOMUS

MOMUS is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
     Against horizons purple, silent.
 

     Yes, Momus,
Men have flung your face in bronze
To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.
They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,
Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;
All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones
Thrown over and through with a smile that forever
     wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the
     iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone
     into dreams, by God.
 

I wonder, Momus,
Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look
     with deep laughter
On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known,
     solemn repetitions of history.
 

A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from
     your kindliness of bronze,
You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple,
     silent;
Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and
     women
Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil,
     the salt of tears,
And blood drops of undiminishing war.